BitPay review

Four products, one name

Almost every confused question about BitPay comes from not knowing which product is being discussed.

The payment processor is the original and largest business. Merchants use it to accept cryptocurrency, and it settles for them. When you pay with crypto at eGifter, BitPay is processing that transaction in the background.

The wallet is a consumer app for holding crypto. Ordinary self-custody, nothing exotic.

The gift card shop lives inside the wallet app and the Chrome extension. This is the part comparable to the other platforms on this site.

The BitPay Card is a prepaid Mastercard funded from the wallet. It is the product most people mean when they mention BitPay, and it is the one with a status change worth knowing.

Buying gift cards

Gift card purchases are available in the BitPay app using the BitPay Wallet, and through the Pay with BitPay Chrome extension. You pick the retailer, the amount and the coin, and the code appears in the app.

Individual cards load between $25 and $1,000. The upper limit is generous; the lower one is not. Most competitors start at $5 or $10, and a $25 floor rules out the small top-up purchases that are often the most sensible use of this category — buying exactly what you are about to spend rather than parking value in a balance.

The integration is the genuine advantage. If your crypto already sits in the BitPay wallet, there is no address to copy, no network to select and no quote window to race. That removes the single most common way people lose money in this category, which is sending on the wrong chain.

What is absent is rewards. No Sats Back, no points, nothing to offset the markup sitting inside the listed price. On any brand that Bitrefill also carries, that usually decides it.

The card, and the waitlist

The BitPay Card was for years one of the few straightforward ways to spend crypto anywhere Mastercard is accepted. Its current status matters more than its features.

For existing holders the economics are reasonable: no annual fee, no monthly fee, a $10,000 daily purchase limit, and merchant cash-back offers that can reach as high as 15% on selected retailers. Treat that 15% as a promotional ceiling on specific merchants rather than a rate you will see regularly.

The costs are a $10 fee per card issue or replacement and a 3% international transaction fee on foreign-denominated purchases, whether at a point of sale outside the US or online with a non-US merchant. That 3% is standard for prepaid products and it is the reason we would not recommend any crypto card as a travel instrument without checking it first.

What older guides get wrong

Two specific claims circulate widely and are both out of date. They are worth correcting because acting on either wastes your time.

"Buy Mastercard gift cards with Bitcoin in the BitPay app." Mastercard gift card purchases within the BitPay Wallet app and extension were made unavailable in April 2023. The articles describing it are still online and still ranking. If an open-loop prepaid card funded with crypto is what you want, our prepaid card page covers the routes that work.

"Order the BitPay Card." Covered above — waitlist only.

This is a broader pattern worth internalising about this whole category. Product availability changes quietly and nobody updates the guides, because the pages keep earning regardless. Our editorial policy explains how we try to handle that, and it is also why we date every page.