Krak card review: the Kraken-backed debit card that pays you back in crypto

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Krak card is a Mastercard debit card issued under the Kraken brand. In plain terms, it lets you spend funds held in your Krak account (the consumer app from the Kraken crypto exchange) at any merchant that accepts Mastercard, both online and in physical shops. The card draws on a euro or pound balance rather than directly on crypto at the till, and it pays a small cashback in cash or crypto on what you spend.

If you already have a Krak or Kraken account and live in the UK or EU, the card is one of the cheapest crypto cards on the market: no monthly or annual fees, no foreign-exchange markup, and no transaction fees from Krak itself. The price you pay is a variable spread when you spend crypto, eligibility limited to UK and EU residents, and the usual custodial risk of keeping funds on an exchange-linked platform. This review walks through what the card actually costs, who can get one, and how it compares to the main alternatives.

Conditions on this page are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

The Krak card scores 7.1 out of 10 in my assessment, with everyday use as its strongest suit and accessibility as its weakest. It is best suited to UK and EU residents who already keep crypto on Kraken or Krak and want a low-fee way to spend a euro or pound balance, with the option to dip into crypto for spending. It is poorly suited to anyone outside the UK and EU, anyone looking for a self-custody card, and anyone who needs rich travel insurance or premium tier benefits, because the only real upgrade is a metal version for high-balance customers.

If you fit the eligibility criteria and you keep funds on Krak or Kraken already, the card is hard to beat on raw cost. If you are outside the UK/EU or you are allergic to custodial platforms, look elsewhere.

Who they will give the card to

Krak currently issues cards to residents of the UK and the EU, with the card page noting that “more countries coming soon”. That eligibility is based on where you live, not where you were born or what passport you hold. If you move to a non-supported country, you may find that you can no longer top up or that your card is closed, so it is worth thinking about the long-term if you relocate often.

A help article goes slightly further and lists the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area and the United States as the regions where personal accounts can be opened, which is broader than the card page’s “UK and EU” wording. That kind of mismatch is common between marketing pages and policy documents, and it is something to keep in mind: the card page is the practical gatekeeper, while the help article hints at a wider footprint. Geo restrictions apply in any case, so a country not on the list is not a viable option today.

The card sits on top of a Krak account, which itself sits on top of Kraken, the crypto exchange. To be issued a card you must have a verified Krak account with completed KYC, be at least 18 years old, and have your identity verified by Monavate, the regulated entity that actually issues the card. The exact documents you need to upload, the time it takes to be approved, and the proof of address rules are not laid out on the public pages, so you should expect to provide standard photo ID, a selfie, and possibly a utility bill or bank statement when you go through the flow.

How to get the card

The signup path is straightforward: open a Krak account, complete KYC, then order a card from the app. A virtual card is available within minutes, which is useful if you want to start spending online right away. A physical card (orange or black) is also free and is shipped to UK and EEA delivery addresses; delivery time is not stated on the public pages, and a third-party source suggests it is normally within 14 business days. A metal card in stainless steel (16g) is also offered and is reserved for customers who hold an average of GBP/EUR 50,000 in combined assets across Krak, Kraken and Kraken Pro.

A few practical details worth knowing upfront:

• The card is a Mastercard debit, not a credit card, and you cannot spend more than your Everyday account balance.
• You can spend in 600+ currencies, and the card is available for adding to mobile wallets.
• If your card is lost or stolen, replacement costs $4.99 (or the equivalent in your card currency); unofficial sources quote GBP/EUR 60 for a metal replacement, which is consistent with the higher replacement cost for premium cards.
• Virtual and physical cards are managed separately, so cancelling one does not cancel the other, and you can have both active at the same time.

If the metal threshold is in reach, the metal card is essentially a “pay for status” option with no extra features beyond weight and feel. If you are not going to clear GBP/EUR 50,000 across Krak, Kraken and Kraken Pro, the standard card is the practical choice.

Fees: what the card really costs

The cost profile is the card’s strongest selling point. Krak says the card is “free to order”, with no monthly or annual fees, and no transaction, FX, or Krak ATM withdrawal fees on what you spend. The Mastercard rate is passed through without markup, so when you pay in a foreign currency the conversion is at the network rate. There is a $4.99 replacement fee if you lose the card or need a new one.

The key fee to understand is the variable spread. When you pay with a fiat balance (euros or pounds), Krak does not charge a fee. When you pay with a crypto asset, Krak converts it on the sell side at a spread that is not published as a fixed number. In practice, this means the spread you see when selling a coin on the app at the moment of payment is what you pay, and that spread can be wider than the spread on a major exchange because the conversion is bundled into a single payment. The card page simply says a variable spread applies; it does not say how wide that spread is or when it is at its tightest. If you are cost-sensitive, the safest approach is to convert to euros or pounds in advance and spend from the fiat balance.

Three everyday examples to make this concrete:

Coffee in London, paid from your GBP Everyday balance. No fees, no FX, no spread. This is the cheapest possible way to use the card.

Lunch in Paris, paid from your EUR Everyday balance. The merchant may present the charge in euros; if it presents it in pounds, you are hit with no FX markup from Krak (Mastercard’s rate applies), so the cost is just the spread if you had to convert pounds to euros. If your card is a UK card denominated in pounds, paying in euros triggers a Mastercard FX conversion at the network rate, with no Krak markup, but you still face the spread if you sold crypto to top up that pound balance.

A flight booked in US dollars, paid from crypto. Krak converts your chosen asset to dollars at the prevailing spread, then the payment is processed by Mastercard with no Krak FX fee. The all-in cost is the spread, which is the only meaningful cost in this scenario.

ATM withdrawals in 190+ countries are free from Krak’s side. Third-party ATM operators may charge a fee that is shown on screen before you confirm the withdrawal. Free allowance is not stated, and daily, weekly and monthly limits apply that vary by region and are shown in the app. Unofficial sources also report that contactless payments above certain thresholds require a PIN: GBP 300 in the UK and a cumulative EUR 150 in the EEA, which is consistent with standard regional rules.

One last point: hotels and car rentals often place a pre-authorisation hold for 10–20% above the estimated bill. The unused portion of that hold can take up to seven days to clear, which is standard industry behaviour and not a Krak-specific issue.

Top up: how to fund the card

The card spends from a balance called the Krak Everyday account. To top it up, you deposit funds into the Everyday account in the app. Krak supports Plaid for euro and pound deposits from a linked bank account, and there are PayPal deposit articles in the help centre, but the official pages do not publish a comprehensive list of supported networks, coins, or the specific networks on which deposits are accepted. A third-party source mentions near-instant card deposits at a cost of GBP/EUR 0.25 plus 3.75%, which is a significant premium over a free bank transfer if you use it.

The key behavioural point is the Spend Order. When you make a card payment, the app draws on the balances you have set in a specific order, which you control. You might set euros first, then USDC, then a small altcoin allocation. If the first balance is short, the app dips into the next. Krak offers more than 600 assets, but not all of them are available for card use, and unsupported assets show up as “Unavailable” in the Spend Order. Fiat balances can also be spent, so you do not need to keep crypto on the platform to use the card.

Some deposit methods carry a three-day withdrawal hold before funds become available to spend, which is a standard anti-fraud measure for new funding sources. Deposit minimums and fees are not stated on the pages I read, so a quick check inside the app is the most reliable way to confirm the cost of a given top-up route. The card FAQ does not describe how to withdraw the Everyday balance back to a bank or in crypto, and closing the Kraken E-Wallet terminates the Monavate card agreement, so it is worth treating the card and the underlying account as one product, not two.

Paying with it every day

In day-to-day use, the Krak card behaves like a competent Mastercard debit. It supports Apple Pay, and third-party sources confirm Google Pay support, even though the official card page does not explicitly mention it. The card can be added to both mobile wallets, and you can block specific currencies from being spent through the Spend Order, which is a useful control if you want to make sure only euros leave the account.

Merchants cannot see that the card is connected to a crypto balance. They see a Mastercard debit from the UK or Lithuania, depending on which entity issued your card. This matters because some merchants run automated checks on the card’s BIN (the first six or eight digits that identify the issuer) and may decline or flag cards from unfamiliar issuers or countries. The Krak card carries a standard UK or EEA BIN, so it usually passes those checks, but you may still hit the occasional foreign-issuer decline on a US-only merchant that relies on Address Verification Service, which is largely US, Canada and UK only.

The cashback is the other everyday feature. Krak pays up to 2% cashback in cash or crypto, with the exact rate depending on your average assets held across Krak, Kraken and Kraken Pro. Travel booked through Krak Concierge earns up to 4% cashback. The rate is variable, and the threshold structure is not published in detail, so the practical way to think about cashback is: the more you keep on the Krak/Kraken platform, the higher your reward. If you keep most of your crypto on a different exchange, the cashback is the headline number and not the realised number.

If something goes wrong with a transaction, you open the transaction in the app and tap “Get help with this transaction”. Krak’s policy is to acknowledge UK complaints within 24 hours and send a final response within 15 business days, extendable by 20; EEA complaints follow a 15-business-day path, extendable to 35. There is a 14-day cooling-off window for fee refunds, and a Kraken help article notes that disputes themselves can take 45–60 days to resolve, which is consistent with card-industry norms. If a refund is issued, the money returns to the Everyday account in the card’s primary currency and is not automatically converted back into the crypto you originally spent.

A few extra everyday-use notes:

• iOS and Android apps are available through the App Store and Google Play; ratings are not stated on the official pages.
• The card has real-time transaction monitoring, data encryption, and instant freeze/unfreeze/replace inside the app, which is the standard safety set for modern fintech cards.
• Two-factor authentication is not explicitly described in the card terms, so if you use 2FA, it is on the underlying Krak account rather than on the card specifically.

What can go wrong

The card is cheap and easy to use once it works, but there are a few risks worth weighing.

The Trustpilot profile for krak.app shows mixed reviews, with some users reporting account restrictions after a bank transfer or deposit, which can make funds temporarily inaccessible. This is a common practice for regulated platforms, where transfers from new or unverified sources can trigger anti-money-laundering reviews. Users have reported such restrictions on first top-ups from new banks, and the wide gap in Trustpilot scores—from 1.9/5 to 3.8/5 across different sample sizes—reflects a divided user experience, with many satisfied customers alongside those who have encountered these freezes.

A Reddit report from July 2026 describes an 11-day security review that suspended deposits, withdrawals and card use, with Kraken support later acknowledging internally that the team “dropped the ball”. That kind of outage is rare but it is the kind of thing that can happen at a crypto platform, and it is a reminder that funds held on Krak are not in your own custody.

The card is issued by Monavate in the UK (FCA reference number 901097) and by Monavate UAB in Lithuania (licence number 92). A third-party source (penchan.co, undated and unverified) reports a Bank of Lithuania fine or warning to Monavate UAB on AML and safeguarding grounds, which is worth knowing even if the report is not confirmed on the official channel. Treat any third-party enforcement report with caution, but also do not ignore it entirely.

Other reported incidents include card payments failing for around 6–8 hours in the UK and EEA on a few occasions, and auto-freezes after small transfers from sanctioned addresses. The latter is a feature of the platform’s sanctions screening, which can over-trigger on false positives; the practical workaround is to make sure the source of funds is clear and well-documented.

The card supports 3-D Secure for online payments, and the underlying Krak app has 2FA at the account level. Crypto on the platform is custodial: Kraken holds the keys, and the assets are not covered by any deposit guarantee scheme. Fiat balances sit in segregated accounts at regulated institutions but, per a third-party source, are not covered by the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme and the EEA wallet has no deposit-guarantee coverage either. The card is an e-money product, not a bank product, so the protections that apply to bank accounts (FSCS, deposit guarantee) do not apply by default.

Card programmes can be closed by the network. The most cited examples are Visa terminating its global agreements with FTX in November 2022 and Visa suspending WaveCrest in Europe in 2018. If the Krak programme were ever wound down, the typical pattern is a notice period, after which loading stops, spending stops, and users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. This is not a Krak-specific risk, but it is the risk of any card that depends on a network licence held by a third party.

Finally, taxes. In the US, the IRS treats crypto as property, so spending crypto is a disposal and may create a capital gain or loss. In the UK and EU, similar rules apply: spending crypto is generally a taxable event, measured at fair market value in the local currency on the date of the transaction. If you are spending from a crypto balance, the spread you pay is effectively the cost basis question playing out in real time, and the realised gain or loss needs to be tracked on your own. The card itself does not produce a tax report, so this is on you.

What to take instead

Krak is not the only crypto card, and the alternatives that follow are useful comparisons if you are not eligible, or if you want a different trade-off.

Young Card

The Young Card scores 5.7/10 in my assessment. It pays cashback in YNG tokens, with rates that depend on a Club tier: 0.1% on Essential, 1.8% on Gold and 3.6% on Platinum. Bronze and Silver rates are not stated. Public information on eligibility, card form factor, fees, and funding is thin, which is a problem if you want to plan around it. If you are a heavy YNG holder and want exposure to the token, the cashback structure is competitive; if you just want a low-fee everyday card, the picture is less clear.

Coinbase Card

The Coinbase Card scores 6.4/10. It is a Visa prepaid debit available in all US states except Hawaii, and the onboarding follows the USA PATRIOT Act identity rules. Coinbase charges no spending or annual fees, and a spread applies when you convert crypto at the moment of payment, which is the same model Krak uses. Funding is by linked bank account or paycheck deposit, both free. The cashback is in user-selected crypto, with the rate shown in the app, and the rewards are only available to US cardholders. If you are a US-based Coinbase user who wants a similar low-fee card, this is the natural alternative.

OKX

The OKX card scores 6.2/10. It is a Mastercard euro-denominated virtual debit linked to OKX Pay, available to EU users plus Norway, with Iceland and Liechtenstein excluded. The launch press release put the conversion spread at 0.4%; an explainer from May 2026 quotes 0.1%, and the two numbers are inconsistent. The card is virtual only as far as public information goes, and funding is via USDC or USDG in OKX Pay; other coins must be converted first, and there is no auto top-up, so the payment is declined if the balance is short. Cashback is paid only on USDG purchases, with monthly caps that vary by VIP tier: 2% (cap EUR 10) at Regular, 4% (EUR 300 unofficial) at VIP1, 4.5% (EUR 450 unofficial) at VIP2, 5% (EUR 1,000 unofficial) at VIP3, and 10% (EUR 1,000 unofficial) at VIP4+. A 30-day launch promo offered up to 20% for VIP and 15% for regular users. If you are a eurozone OKX user, the spread-based pricing is the main thing to compare against Krak.

A quick comparison across the three:

Who I would recommend this card to

If you live in the UK or the EU, already keep funds on Krak or Kraken, and want a no-monthly-fee card that earns a small crypto or cash cashback on everyday spend, the Krak card is hard to argue with. The fee structure is among the most generous in the category: no monthly or annual fee, no FX markup, no Krak ATM fee, and a single variable spread on the crypto side. The mobile-wallet support, the 190+ country ATM reach, and the 600+ currency acceptance cover almost any use case a normal shopper would have.

If you live outside the UK and EU, hold most of your crypto on a different platform, want a self-custody card, or are unwilling to keep meaningful euro or pound balances on a custodial platform, this is not the card for you. The eligibility is the biggest practical filter, the spread is the biggest cost to watch, and the counterparty risk is the biggest open question. For users who fit the criteria, the card is a strong default; for users who do not, the alternatives above are the right starting point.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Krak card?

The Krak card is a Mastercard debit card that lets you spend funds held in your Krak account (the consumer app from the Kraken crypto exchange) at any merchant that accepts Mastercard. It supports virtual, physical and metal versions, and pays up to 2% cashback in cash or crypto on spending.

How does the Krak card work?

When you pay, the card draws on your Krak Everyday account balance in a Spend Order you set in the app. If you pay with crypto, Krak converts it to the card’s primary currency (GBP for UK cards, EUR for EEA cards) on the sell side at a variable spread; if you pay with fiat, no Krak fee applies.

Is Krak a bank?

No. Krak is the consumer app from Kraken, a crypto exchange. The card itself is issued by Monavate in the UK (an e-money institution authorised by the FCA) and by Monavate UAB in Lithuania, and the underlying account is an e-money account, not a bank deposit.

Who owns Krak?

Krak is the consumer brand operated by Kraken, one of the larger crypto exchanges. The card is issued by Monavate, not by Krak or Kraken directly.

Is the Krak card available in the United States?

The card page says the card is available to UK and EU residents, with more countries coming soon. A Krak help article lists the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area and the United States as regions where personal accounts can be opened, but the card page is the practical gatekeeper and does not list the US today.

How do I get a Krak card?

You open a Krak account, complete KYC, and order the card from the app. A virtual card is available within minutes, and a physical card is shipped free to UK and EEA addresses.

Does the Krak card require KYC?

Yes. You must have a verified Krak account with completed KYC, and Monavate must verify your identity before issuing the card. You also need to be at least 18 years old.

How do I add the Krak card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?

Open the Krak app, go to the card section, and follow the prompts to add the card to your mobile wallet. The card supports Apple Pay, and third-party sources confirm Google Pay support.

Is the Krak card free?

The card is free to order, with no monthly or annual fees, and no Krak transaction, FX or ATM fees. A variable spread applies when you spend crypto, and a $4.99 fee applies for card replacement.

Is the Krak card safe?

The card supports instant freeze, real-time transaction monitoring and 3-D Secure, and funds are held by regulated entities (Monavate in the UK, Monavate UAB in Lithuania). Crypto on the platform is custodial, and fiat balances are not covered by the FSCS in the UK or by an EEA deposit guarantee scheme, so the protections are not the same as those of a bank account.

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