Two cards, no annual fee, no published price list

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Most of the reasons people look for a crypto card are not about crypto. They are about not having a normal bank card: a shop that declines the card you have, a payroll account closed, a country where opening an account is a problem, or a simple wish to hold a card that works in a wallet on the phone. That is the reader I had in mind here — someone anywhere who wants a card that spends without drama, and who is willing to look at how the money behaves.

The CoinUp card is a virtual Mastercard plus a physical Visa, both tied to an existing CoinUp account and both funded from a crypto balance. On the everyday-use side it scores well. On the cost side, the card’s own pages say a lot about what is free and almost nothing about what is charged, and that silence is the single biggest thing to weigh before you apply.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 6.1 out of 10, and the shape of the good and bad

The score is 6.1 out of 10. Read that number as one balanced card rather than a bad one: the coin side is ordinary-to-good, the money side is ordinary-to-poor, and the company behind it is the part I keep coming back to.

This card suits you if you already hold an account on the CoinUp exchange, your balance sits in crypto you would spend anyway, you live in a region the app actually serves, and you would rather not read a fee schedule because there isn’t one. It suits you badly if the card is your main way of moving real money, if you live on a tight monthly budget and want to know what a coffee costs, or if a frozen account would be a serious problem for you — because the complaints that concern me are about exactly that.

The audience note the score carries with it: exchange users who want a card with crypto cashback. That is precisely who it is built for, and precisely who will not be disappointed. If you came looking for a card that spends from your bank balance with no crypto involved, this is the wrong product.

Here is the score card criterion by criterion.

Who will they give you the card to

Yes, to a very wide group on paper: the card’s own page says “170+ countries and regions”. That is the headline number, and it is genuinely large.

But here is the catch, and it is the first thing I would check before anything else. The same page also says the card is “available in select regions. Check the app”. So the 170+ figure and the select-regions caveat are sitting side by side, and the caveat is the operative one. The card is not universally available across those 170-plus places; your own eligibility is decided by the app, and the page does not publish the list.

I would not read “170+ countries” as “I am in one of them”. I would read it as “the company says it operates widely”. Before you plan a payment around this card, open the app and find out whether it offers the card where you are. If it does not, everything else in this review is theoretical.

Two things about eligibility worth knowing generally. Cards of this kind are prepaid products, and prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults aged 18 and over, with some issuers setting higher limits. And availability is not only about where you live: nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to the address.

The requirements themselves are listed further down, under the “How to get the card” section. They are short, which is a good sign, but the identity part is where most of the friction sits.

How to get the card

Three requirements, stated by the card: an active CoinUp account, completed KYC identity verification, and an eligible region. The page describes the KYC as taking “in just a few minutes” in the app. Then the sequence is: create an account and pass verification, apply in the app, top up, spend.

That is the whole process as described. What the card does not state, and what I would want to know before I start, is which KYC level you end up at and what it unlocks. Verification tiers are not stated at all. So “verified” here is a single undifferentiated word: you will be verified, you will not be told in advance which limits or which features your verification level carries, and if you hit a limit later you may find the tier explained only after the fact. On a card with a large monthly ceiling on the physical side, that gap matters.

What you apply for is two different things, and this surprises people. One account gives you both cards:

• A virtual card on Mastercard. Up to 5 of them, activated in the app.
• A physical card on Visa, marked “New”. 1 card, applied for in the app and delivered to you.

For the physical card, the card’s page says only that it is applied for in the app and delivered. Countries, delivery time and delivery cost are not stated. That is a real practical unknown: you may be weeks from having something in your hand, and you may or may not pay for the postage. Anyone planning to use the physical card as their main one should assume they are spending the first month or more on the virtual card.

One account, two card types, cards topped up separately, and — worth repeating because it is unusual and positive — no VIP requirement attached to the physical card.

What it really costs: the fees you can see and the ones you can’t

This is the weakest part of the offer, and the reason the cost score sits at 6. Here is everything the card’s pages actually say about money.

Read that table again. The two rows that are actually filled in are the absence of an annual fee and the absence of an inactivity fee. Everything that would hit you on a given purchase is blank.

So let me walk three everyday payments through what I can and cannot tell you.

A coffee in your own country, on the virtual card. The annual and inactivity fees are not the issue here. What I cannot tell you is whether a conversion happens at all, and if it does, what it costs. The currency the card spends in is not stated. If your balance is held in crypto and the card converts at payment, there is a rate and a spread somewhere in that path, and the card does not publish it. This is the ordinary, everyday, boring purchase — and it is precisely the one the public pages leave undefined.

A subscription bought while you travel, on the physical card, in a currency other than your balance’s. This is where a foreign-exchange fee would appear if one exists. FX fees are not stated. Separately, there is a category effect that hits any foreign-issued card: a merchant can look up the BIN — the 6 or 8 digit issuer prefix at the front of your card number — and see which institution and country issued the card, and apply extra scrutiny if that issuer country differs from your billing address. A card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another, and some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs for that reason alone. Your payment might fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the amount.

Withdrawing cash at an ATM abroad, on the physical card. Withdrawals are available. The fee is not stated, and neither is which network’s own surcharge will be added on top. I would plan the cash withdrawal as the most expensive of the three by a wide margin and be pleasantly surprised if it is not.

The honest summary: the card advertises the absence of annual and inactivity fees and says nothing else about price. I would not sign up on the assumption that spending is free — I would assume there is a conversion spread somewhere, because a card that turns crypto into fiat has to exchange it somewhere, and go looking for the number in the in-app screens before you commit to using this as your everyday card.

How to top it up

Top-up with crypto. From your CoinUp account to the CoinUp Card, described as “ready to use instantly”.

That is the whole mechanism, and the sentence is genuinely appealing: no bank transfer, no waiting, no card-network top-up. You move crypto you already hold and it becomes spendable balance.

What is not stated is the part that decides whether it actually works for you. Coins and networks are not named. So I cannot tell you whether the token you hold — or the one stablecoin you would want to use as a stand-in for cash — is accepted, and I cannot tell you which network the transfer should go on. Fees and the minimum transfer amount are also not stated. And withdrawal, if you wanted to take money back out the other way, is not stated at all.

There is a general point about networks that is worth understanding before your first transfer, because it is where people lose money. On-chain network fees for a deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider, so a transfer will cost something even though the card says nothing about it. Worse, blockchain transfers are irreversible: a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to another network, can be lost or may need manual recovery with no guarantee. Sending to the wrong network is not a mistake a support desk can always undo. That is why “which network” is not a detail to check after the fact — it is the one thing worth confirming with the app before you move anything.

One practical note on stablecoins, since they are the natural top-up choice: the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in USDT and USDC at July 2025, and those two sit on a lot of chains — Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche among them. So the network choice is genuinely open to you in principle. Whether CoinUp supports the pair you want is what the app has to answer.

Paying with it every day

This is where the card is at its best, and it is why the everyday-use mark is 8.

The virtual Mastercard exists in numbers: up to 5 of them, each activated in the app. Five cards means you can put a separate one on each subscription, so that a service that gets cancelled does not get handed your main card. It means you can hold a card per merchant. For anyone who has spent time cancelling a subscription they could not reach, that is a small quality-of-life feature that is worth more than it sounds.

Apple Pay and Google Pay both work on the virtual card. That matters more than the number of cards does. Adding a card to a phone wallet replaces the card number with a device-specific number stored in the phone’s secure hardware, never on Apple’s servers, and every payment uses a fresh one-time code. You get a virtual card you never touch, a phone you never leave, and no card to lose physically.

The cashback is the reason the card is marketed at all: crypto cashback on every purchase. Rate and payout coin are not stated. Treat the number as a nice thing that happens rather than a budget line — if you are going to justify the card financially, do it on the parts you can verify.

There is no separate card app. The app on the App Store is the exchange app, listed as “CoinUp-Buy Crypto,Eth,DOGE”, rated 4.57 from 28 ratings, version 100037 dated 2026-07-04, read 2026-10-22. So the card is managed inside the exchange app. That is a design decision you should be comfortable with: your everyday payment tool and your exchange account share one front door, and with it one login, one device, one app update path.

What is not stated: disputes and chargebacks. There is no published process for what happens when a payment goes wrong or a merchant takes the money and never delivers. There is a general mechanism in the industry — a chargeback is a refund ordered by the card issuer, with reason codes for fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received — but prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. If a dispute matters to you, ask before you rely on the card.

Also worth knowing about declining payments: a declined authorisation may leave a hold on funds that can remain for several days, typically up to 7. A payment that fails is not always instantly your money back.

What can go wrong

The security features are fine and worth listing first, because they are real: the physical card offers real-time alerts and PIN verification, and card settings are managed in the CoinUp app. Freeze it, set limits, watch the transactions. Standard, adequate, nothing remarkable.

The trouble is not the card’s features. It is the company.

CoinUp Global Limited is the entity named on the site. The issuer is not stated, and no licences are stated. Those two absences are worth more attention than they might look. A card programme runs on a licence: in the standard industry structure, the card network (Visa or Mastercard) sets the rules and routes the messages, an issuer licensed to issue under that network holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often only a programme manager or front end marketing it. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves — they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. So the name on the site is not necessarily the name that stands behind your balance, and the page does not tell you which name that is. The footer carries “COINUP LIMITED 20211565064”. Whether that number is a licence, a registration or a company identifier, the site does not say.

Then the complaints. These are about the exchange, not about the card specifically, and I want to keep that distinction clear rather than let a reader conflate them: Trustpilot for the CoinUp exchange shows 2.7 of 5 across 12 reviews, read 2026-10-21, with 66% one-star. Twelve reviews is a very small sample and 2.7 of 5 is a very low score, so the direction is clear even if the scale is not.

What people describe, from that Trustpilot page: frozen funds and blocked accounts between July 2025 and September 2026; an unpaid refund and a broken listing agreement in August and September 2026; USDT frozen for eight days with scripted support answers in July 2026; and accounts blocked after profitable trades in July and August 2025. On the positive side, February and March 2026 reviews mention fast KYC and an easy interface.

Read those themes against the fact that funds on a card like this sit with a custodian. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key; with a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials, so you must trust the provider completely. Transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery. Custodial platforms have a history: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). So counterparty risk and hack risk are part of the package by design, not by bad luck.

The Freeze pattern is the one I would set as the guard rail. This kind of business freezes funds — and sometimes whole accounts — for compliance reasons, sometimes for good ones. Under EU rules, if due diligence cannot be completed, the institution must refrain from the transaction or the relationship and, where necessary, end existing relationships; that is why accounts are closed or documents are demanded. So freezing is not automatically misconduct. But an account frozen on the exchange means the balance feeding your card is frozen too, and a card with no money behind it still has recurring subscriptions pointing at it.

Two structural risks sit outside the company’s control. First, programme closures: when a card programme ends, the usual sequence is a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. Second, merchant categories: MCC 7995 covers gambling — casinos, betting, lotteries — and many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list varying by issuer. If any part of your spending depends on that category, check before you rely on it. Address verification is worth knowing too: AVS compares the numeric parts of the billing address a buyer types against issuer records, it is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK, and it is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines.

On support: the site lists a Help Center, Contact Us, Feedback, and official Telegram channels in Chinese and International, plus X channels. That is a reasonable spread of channels. Whether they answer is a separate question — one of the Trustpilot reports describes scripted support answers.

What to take instead

Three alternatives, all of which I would look at before applying, mostly because they publish more than CoinUp does.

Take these one at a time, because they fail in different directions.

Young Card scores lowest of the three and has the thinnest public information on this card specifically: countries, card type, fees and funding for the card itself are not stated. What it does publish is a rewards structure — cashback in YNG tokens at a rate that climbs with your Club tier — which is at least a number you can read. If you are comparing on rewards alone, this is the only one of the four with a full published tier table.

Coinbase Card is the most transparent and the most restricted. It is available in all US states except Hawaii, and no other countries; account opening follows the USA PATRIOT Act identity rules — name, address, date of birth, ID. It is a Visa prepaid debit card, virtual or physical, spending cash or crypto, with all crypto converted to US dollars for purchases and ATM withdrawals. On cost it says “Zero spending fees and no annual fees”, with all fees disclosed in the Cardholder Agreement and User Agreement — which is the sentence I would give a lot to hear from CoinUp. The catch: no Coinbase transaction fees, but a spread applies when Coinbase buys, sells or trades crypto, so the cost lands at conversion time at payment. Funding is a linked bank account or part of a paycheck deposited into Coinbase at zero fees, or a crypto balance that gets converted to USD. Rewards are optional crypto rewards on every purchase, US Card users only, at a variable rate shown in the app with a rotating choice of coins. If you are in the United States, this is the one with the clearest published position on what you will be charged.

OKX sits between the two and is the most interesting for a European reader, with the caveats that come with reading its numbers carefully. It is aimed at the EU plus Norway, launched 28 January 2026, with Iceland and Liechtenstein excluded; the explainer’s conclusion says “entire EEA”, which is inconsistent with its own list, so treat the coverage as the narrower reading. The rule differs by user: users in the EEA are covered by OKX Europe Ltd., a MiCAR-licensed entity. It is a Mastercard, euro-denominated virtual debit card linked to OKX Pay, issued through an unnamed European licensed payment provider; no physical card is mentioned. Card fee: none, per the explainer as of May 2026. Fees: no transaction fee and no OKX FX fee, but the conversion spread is stated as 0.1% in the explainer of May 2026 against a 0.4% market spread in the launch press release — a conflict, and the explainer is the newer of the two, so the 0.1% is the more likely current figure, though I would not treat a conflicted number as settled. Conversion to euro happens at purchase. Funding is USDC or USDG held in OKX Pay, either via Convert or an external deposit; any other coin has to be converted first, there is no auto top-up, and the payment is declined if the balance is insufficient. Rewards are cashback only on USDG purchases — USDC earns none — with monthly caps in euro: Regular 2% capped at 10; VIP1 4% at 300; VIP2 4.5% at 450; VIP3 5% at 1,000; VIP4+ 10% at 1,000; the text says 2–5% while the table says 10%, which is another internal inconsistency. Promos vary; the launch release advertised a 30-day promo up to 20% for VIP and 15% for regular users.

Two structural things that separate OKX from CoinUp and are worth holding on to. Its licensing is visible: an EEA user’s card sits behind a MiCAR-licensed entity. And MiCA is real and dated — it took legal effect in June 2023, its rules on asset-referenced and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, the remaining provisions including crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024, and the transitional period lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised CASPs, white papers and non-compliant entities, and you can check a provider there. A CASP authorised in one member state can serve the whole EU. Note also that a card is a payment service regulated separately — MiCA covers the crypto side, so a crypto card often depends on two licences. EMIs must safeguard customer funds in dedicated accounts or by insuring them, but such funds are not bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. In the US the picture is different: FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while mere users buying goods or services are not.

If you are in the EEA and want a card whose regulator you can name, OKX is the more legible proposition. If you are in the US, Coinbase Card is. If you are everywhere else — which is where CoinUp’s “170+ countries and regions” pitch is aimed — the CoinUp card is one of very few that says yes to you, and its silences are the price of being one of the few.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the CoinUp card to a specific person: someone who already uses CoinUp to buy crypto, keeps a balance they would spend anyway, lives somewhere the app confirms the card is available, and wants a wallet-friendly virtual card with cashback and does not need the card to be anything more predictable than that. For that person this is a good product — five virtual cards, both major wallets, no annual fee, no inactivity fee, no VIP requirement, instant top-up from crypto.

I would not recommend it as your only card, and I would want two things answered in the app before I relied on it that way.

First, the price of a purchase. Not the annual fee — the conversion rate and spread, the FX treatment, and the ATM fee. All three are unstated on the card’s public pages. If the app shows them clearly, this objection largely disappears. If it does not, you are budgeting in the dark, and for a card whose entire job is everyday spending, that is disqualifying.

Second, who holds your money when the exchange has a bad week. The issuer is not named and no licences are stated, and the exchange carries 2.7 of 5 on Trustpilot across 12 reviews with frozen funds and blocked accounts as recurring themes. If the answer is “an unnamed issuer and a custodial balance at CoinUp Global Limited”, then the honest position is that your money sits with a company with a documented history of freezing it, and the card is just the front door.

Frequently asked questions

What is the CoinUp card?

The CoinUp card is a payment card tied to a CoinUp exchange account, funded from a crypto balance. You get two kinds from one account: a virtual card on Mastercard, up to 5 of them, activated in the app, and a physical card on Visa, marked “New”, applied for in the app and delivered to you. Spending crypto cashback comes back on every purchase.

How does the CoinUp card work?

You top up by transferring crypto from your CoinUp account to the CoinUp Card, described as ready to use instantly. The card then spends that balance like a prepaid card — crypto is converted and loaded as balance, so the card cannot overdraw it. Apple Pay and Google Pay work on the virtual card, and ATM withdrawals are available on the physical one.

Is CoinUp a bank?

Not on the evidence the site publishes. The entity named is CoinUp Global Limited, and the card’s issuer and licences are not stated. In this category the card network sets rules, a licensed issuer holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often only a programme manager or front end. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers directly; they license issuers and can suspend a programme.

Who owns CoinUp?

The site names CoinUp Global Limited, and the footer carries “COINUP LIMITED 20211565064”. Whether that number is a licence, a company registration or a company identifier, the site does not say. I could not find a named issuer or a stated licence on the card’s public pages, which is the gap I would want closed.

Does the CoinUp card require KYC?

Yes. The card lists three requirements: an active CoinUp account, completed KYC identity verification — which it describes as taking just a few minutes in the app — and an eligible region. What the card does not state is which verification level you end up at, so you will not know in advance which limits your verification carries. In the EU, due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documents, a sanctions check and PEP status.

How do I get the CoinUp card and activate it?

Three steps as the card describes them: create an account and pass KYC, apply in the app, then top up and spend. The virtual card is activated in the app and you can hold up to 5. The physical card is applied for in the app and delivered to you — countries, delivery time and delivery cost are not stated, so plan on using the virtual card first.

Is the CoinUp card free?

Free of annual and inactivity fees — the virtual card page says “No annual or inactivity fees” and the physical card page says “No VIP requirement, annual or inactivity fees”. Beyond that, issuance fees, transaction fees, conversion fees, FX fees and ATM withdrawal fees are all not stated. I would treat “free” as meaning no maintenance charge, not that spending costs nothing.

How do I top up the CoinUp card?

With crypto, transferred from your CoinUp account to the CoinUp Card, available instantly. Coins and networks are not named, and neither are the fee or the minimum transfer. That last point matters more than it looks: blockchain transfers are irreversible, so sending on a network the provider does not support can lose the funds. Network fees are charged by the blockchain, not by the card.

Is the CoinUp card safe to use?

It has the ordinary protections — real-time alerts and PIN verification on the physical card, settings managed in the app, and wallet tokenisation if you use Apple Pay or Google Pay. The bigger question is the custodian. Your balance is not in a wallet you control, transfers are irreversible, and custodial platforms have a history of losses: Mt. Gox, Coincheck and Ronin Network among them. On Trustpilot the exchange shows 2.7 of 5 from 12 reviews, with frozen funds and blocked accounts recurring.

Is CoinUp card worth it?

For an exchange user who already holds crypto and wants a wallet-friendly card with cashback, yes — five virtual cards, both major wallets, no annual or inactivity fee, no VIP requirement. For your main everyday card, I would want the conversion spread, the FX treatment and the ATM fee on screen first, since none of them is published, and I would keep a second card so a frozen exchange account does not stop your payments.

Where can I use the CoinUp card?

Anywhere cards from its network are accepted, in practice — the virtual card is online only, and the physical card adds ATM withdrawals. The published limit is “Up to USD 1M monthly limit” on the physical card; virtual card limits are not stated. Two practical catches: merchants can look up the card’s BIN and apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address, and address verification is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines.

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