The metal card is free; the membership behind it is not

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Xapo Bank gives you a physical metal Visa debit card, a standard card and a virtual card, and lets you spend from a balance of US dollars, pounds, euros and Bitcoin held in a Xapo account. That sounds like a plain old bank card with a crypto twist. It is not quite that. Behind the free metal card sits a membership that costs USD 1,000 a year, and the card draws on an account balance rather than on your salary. So the honest question is not “is this a good card” but “is this the right arrangement for how you already hold money” — and the answer differs sharply depending on whether you are a premium banking client holding USD, EUR and Bitcoin, or someone who simply wants a card that works at the supermarket.

My score for it is 5.8 out of 10. That sits near the middle, and it is not a hedge: the card itself is well made and the day-to-day experience scores well, while the cost and the country question pull the whole thing down.

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

Will they give you the card?

You will probably get one, if you are an adult in a supported country with a Xapo account — but the card’s own public pages do not actually tell you where it works. The terms document is titled “Cards Issued Outside Europe Region” and neither it nor the Transact page lists the countries eligible for a card. Citizenship versus residence is not stated either, which matters more than it sounds: screening is usually applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to your address. Two other things are stated plainly: Xapo may refuse to issue a card at its discretion, and people whose accounts were previously suspended cannot order one.

What you may have read elsewhere is third-party information, and I want to be clear about the status: unofficial sources describe availability across 50 listed countries, with the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan and Singapore among them, and 28 restricted countries or jurisdictions including the United States, Russia and Ukraine. Another unofficial source puts the reach at over 100 countries while excluding US residents and US passport holders, and describes eligibility as being by residence. None of that is confirmed by the card. Treat “is Xapo Bank card available in my country” as a question only the support team can answer for you, and ask before you pay anything.

Two reasons to check early rather than late. First, if the country you live in is restricted, the USD 1,000 membership is money you cannot get back by cancelling a card. Second, the answer can change: Xapo has closed accounts in the past, and a membership that is refunded within 30 days only protects you if you notice inside that window.

You need to be at least 18 to order. The card terms do not state which KYC documents or what proof of address are required, so treat the list as unpublished rather than as empty.

How to get it

You cannot order the card on its own; it is attached to a Xapo account, so the account comes first. The card order then goes through a verification process that the card terms describe in outline: a valid passport or national ID, personal details confirming your identity and your residence, and a real-time photo or short video taken in the app. The details are ordinary identity checks — this is a regulated bank, not an anonymous product, and anyone promising you a way past them is either mistaken or dishonest.

What is not stated is the part that frustrates people: there are no named tiers, no published processing time, and no published list of rejection reasons. That gap is worth knowing about before you apply, because the complaints I read include long-running verification problems.

Your membership includes metal, standard and virtual debit cards, and the premium metal card is described as complimentary — free to order. Visa terms apply to cards issued outside the Europe region, though the network itself is not named on the Transact page. Cards are posted only to the verified address; an alternative address is at your own risk and is not guaranteed. Delivery countries, delivery time and delivery cost are not stated, and unofficial sources suggest delivery times vary by region.

One cost is stated and one is not. An additional replacement card within a calendar year costs USD 25. Other re-issues for loss, theft or damage “may apply”, with the amounts living in a Fees Information Sheet that was not part of the pages I could read. Check that sheet before you need it.

What it really costs: Fees and the everyday price of a payment

This is where the card is hardest to recommend. The metal card is free, the foreign-exchange promise is genuinely good, and then there is the membership: USD 1,000 a year, refundable in full within 30 days. There is one membership, not a set of tiers, so there is nothing cheaper to downgrade to. That single number dominates every other fee on this card.

Now the part you actually feel. The card spends the account balance, and the account holds fiat balances in USD, GBP and EUR plus Bitcoin. Each payment can draw from the USD balance or from Bitcoin. Pay in a currency you do not hold and the amount is converted and taken from your balance, with no FX fee and no hidden markup. That part is as advertised, and it is the single most useful thing about the card for a person who holds several currencies at once.

Three ordinary payments, to show where the money goes. A coffee in a country that is not your own: you pay the local amount, it is converted, no FX fee is added, and if the till offers to charge you in dollars instead you decline — the card’s own terms tell you to. A hotel in Tokyo, say: same thing, a larger number, and note that a foreign-issued card can look foreign to a merchant — the issuer country is visible in the card’s BIN — so extra scrutiny is possible. And a cash withdrawal: the first USD 100 in a month is free of the bank’s charge, everything above that costs 2% of the withdrawal amount, on top of whatever the machine’s owner charges. Someone who takes a few hundred out of a cash machine once a month is fine; someone who lives on cash will feel the 2% immediately.

The categories worth knowing about before you are surprised: recurring pre-authorised payments, self-service petrol pumps and cash-like transactions may be declined, and some merchant categories are blocked outright — though the list is not published on the page.

How to top it up

Top up the account, not the card. The card has no separate balance; it spends what is in the Xapo account, so the only real question is how money gets in. You deposit stablecoins — USDC and USDT — and they are converted to USD automatically on arrival. Bank rails cover the fiat side: SWIFT, ACH, RTP and FedACH for US dollars, Faster Payments for sterling, SEPA for euros. Bitcoin arrives over Lightning.

The mechanics are simple; the two things that are not stated are the ones that could cost you. The deposit fee and the minimum top-up are not published on the pages I read. That matters because on-chain network fees — gas or bandwidth — are charged by the blockchain, not by Xapo, so the cost of a crypto deposit is the amount you send plus whatever the network takes plus whatever the provider takes. A small transfer can be an expensive one.

Getting money out is the mirror image. Withdrawals run over SWIFT, ACH, Faster Payments and SEPA, with Bitcoin over Lightning. The withdrawal fee amounts are not stated. The card’s terms do not say what happens to a remaining balance if you close the account, though closing the account cancels the card, the card can also be cancelled on its own, and Xapo may end the agreement with two months’ written notice.

One thing to get right the first time: send a stablecoin deposit over a network the provider supports, to an address on that same network. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on the wrong network, or to an address belonging to another network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee of success. Circle supports USDC natively on 38 networks as of 16 September 2026, and stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option here. If your funds are in the wrong network, move them before you deposit, not after.

Paying with it every day

The everyday experience is the card’s best feature, and it is why I scored everyday use highest of all criteria. You get three instruments in one membership: a metal card, a standard card and a virtual card. The virtual one is the practical one — create it for a single online subscription, and if the merchant is breached or the number leaks, the blast radius is one account. The metal one is for the drawer, and the card is genuinely pleasant to handle. ATMs work in 100+ countries.

The app is a single iOS and Android app running 24/7, with the card freeze and unfreeze control in it — which is the safeguard that matters most day to day, because a frozen card stops being a loss even if it is in someone else’s pocket. The store listings’ ratings and number of ratings were not retrieved, so I cannot tell you what other users rate the app; check the store yourself for the current figures.

Two gaps. Apple Pay and Google Pay are not disclosed on the pages reviewed, so if you live on your phone’s default wallet, do not assume the card goes straight into it. And Xapo blocks a list of merchant category codes — the four-digit numbers that classify a business — but does not publish which ones, so you cannot check in advance whether your usual merchant is blocked. A merchant category covering gambling (7995 in the ISO 18245 classification) is one many issuers block by policy, though the list varies by issuer; with Xapo’s list unpublished, you only find out at the till.

On refunds and disputes: the terms give no dispute or chargeback timeframes at all, and refunds are described as usually taking up to 10 Business Days. If a refund comes back in a currency the account does not hold, it is converted at the payment system’s rate and Xapo says it is not liable for losses from that. That is a real, if narrow, bite.

On rewards: from 1 July 2026 the general everyday cashback was replaced by targeted campaigns. The first is 3% cashback in Bitcoin on rideshares and taxis, running 1 July to 31 October, and it requires an active Metal Card. The card’s own wording is that cashback is available for selected spending only, and no general cashback rate is stated. Separately, there is an intro offer of 4.6% p.a. on the first USD 100,000 of USD Savings for 90 days, for members paying between 22 September and 23 November 2026.

What can go wrong

Let me separate what the card publishes from what users report, because they are not the same quality of evidence.

Officially, there were no incidents found. The issuer is Xapo Bank, incorporated in Gibraltar, Company No. 111928, at 2 Irish Town, Gibraltar GX11 1AA, regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission as a credit institution under the Financial Services Act 2019, with Permission No. 23171. Xapo VASP Limited is separately registered as a DLT provider, Permission No. 26061. USD deposits are covered by the Gibraltar Deposit Guarantee Scheme up to the USD equivalent of GBP 120,000. Bitcoin and other crypto are not covered. Listed certifications are PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3. Two-factor authentication is not mentioned in the card terms, which is a thing to check in the app rather than assume.

What users report is where the mark of 7 out of 10 comes from. On Trustpilot, Xapo Bank sits at 3.9 out of 5 from 1,141 reviews as of 20 October 2026, with 31% of reviews at one star. The themes repeat and cluster: account freezes and closures (November 2025, July 2026, August 2026); inability to withdraw or to close an account (August 2026) and a report of the USD 1,000 annual fee not being refunded (July 2026); slow compliance reviews, one reportedly running seven weeks (June to August 2026); complaints about high fees (June to September 2026); and templated support replies (June, September 2026). Support does draw praise too. On Reddit’s r/CryptoHelp, in 2025, one user describes an identity-verification problem unresolved for more than three years with unresponsive support. In 2014 there was a backlash over an older Xapo debit card’s fee schedule; Xapo blamed its issuer and promised reimbursement — historical, and a different product, but worth knowing if you find the reference.

Read those complaints for what they cluster on rather than as predictions: access to your own money, and speed. A frozen account with a seven-week review and no refund of a USD 1,000 fee is the scenario that should shape your decision. The counterweight is the deposit guarantee and the fact that freeze and unfreeze controls exist in the app — a freeze you can trigger yourself is very different from a freeze imposed on you.

Support is reached through the app or customersupport.xapo.com, with a contact page, a dedicated Relationship Manager for members, and a complaints page.

One structural thing to keep in mind, because it explains failures you have heard of elsewhere. A card payment involves several parties: the network routes the messages and sets the rules, the issuer is the licensed bank holding the programme, and the crypto brand is often only a programme manager. Neither Visa nor Mastercard issues crypto cards to consumers — they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer; WaveCrest, a card issuer that supplied several crypto brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018 and all its programmes closed. Programme closures typically mean a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source stopped new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026 — a single unconfirmed source, but the pattern is worth recognising.

A declined payment can also leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to seven.

What to take instead

None of these is a like-for-like swap: Xapo is the only one here where the card is issued by an actual bank holding a credit-institution permission. But if the membership is the thing stopping you, or your country is restricted, here is how the alternatives line up.

Reading that table, the trade is straightforward. Stella scores highest at 6.5 and is the nearest in spirit: deposit crypto, it tops up a card, you get a physical and a virtual Visa, and no cashback is dangled. What you give up is Xapo’s banking licence and its published deposit guarantee — Stella’s terms bar users under sanctions programmes and route US and European users through affiliates, which means your eligibility depends on reading their terms rather than on a country list. Whop is narrow but honest: 31 US states, “No extra fees”, 5% at Uber. UniFi is the weakest fit at 4.7 and the least documented; eligibility is not confirmed from its own pages.

If the reason you are considering a crypto card is that a card would help you spend crypto you already hold, also weigh the custodial question. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key, and a seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is an unencrypted key that anyone who obtains it can use to restore the wallet and spend the funds. Transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery. Xapo is custodial: the provider holds the credentials and you must trust it completely. Custodial platforms have a genuine record of failure — Mt. Gox, about US$350 million reported stolen in 2011–2014; Coincheck, about US$400 million in 2018; Ronin Network, US$625 million in 2022. A self-custody-linked card keeps the funds in your own wallet until the moment of payment, but then key loss, phishing and clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps copied addresses are yours alone.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Xapo Bank card to someone who already treats Xapo as their primary banking relationship: a premium banking client holding USD, EUR and Bitcoin, comfortable with a USD 1,000 annual membership, in a country that is on the list once you get a straight answer from support. For that person the metal card is a pleasant, well-made instrument, the fee on foreign spending is genuinely competitive, the multi-currency balance is the point, and the ATM allowance covers ordinary behaviour. Read the membership as a banking relationship you are choosing, not as a card fee.

I would not recommend it as a first card, as a backup for someone who just needs a reliable way to pay, or as a way to hold money you cannot afford to have frozen. The membership is the reason for both the good and the bad here: it buys the banking licence and the deposit cover, and it buys a year of your money in exchange for the privilege. Someone outside the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Japan, Singapore or wherever your country sits in that unpublished list should check first — and someone in the United States should assume, on unofficial evidence, that the answer is no.

Two checks before you pay. Ask support, in writing, whether your country of residence and your citizenship are both supported, and keep the answer. And read the Fees Information Sheet, because the amounts I could not see — replacement re-issue fees, deposit fees, minimum top-ups, withdrawal fees — are exactly the ones that turn a good card into a bad month. If you have any doubt about the USD 1,000, remember that the refund window is 30 days, and use it.

Frequently asked questions

What is Xapo Bank card?

It is a Visa debit card, offered in metal, standard and virtual versions, that spends the balance of your Xapo account rather than your salary account. Your balance can hold US dollars, pounds, euros and Bitcoin, and payments can draw from the US dollar or Bitcoin balance. Membership costs USD 1,000 a year, refundable within 30 days, and the metal card itself is free to order.

Is Xapo Bank actually a bank?

Yes, in the regulatory sense. Xapo Bank is incorporated in Gibraltar, Company No. 111928, and is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission as a credit institution under the Financial Services Act 2019, Permission No. 23171. US dollar deposits are covered by the Gibraltar Deposit Guarantee Scheme up to the USD equivalent of GBP 120,000. Bitcoin and other crypto are not covered by that scheme.

Who can get the Xapo Bank card?

You must be at least 18 and have a Xapo account first. The card’s own terms do not publish a country list, and do not say whether eligibility follows citizenship or residence. Unofficial sources describe 50 supported countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan and Singapore, with 28 restricted including the United States, Russia and Ukraine — none of which is confirmed by the card. Ask support before paying.

How much does the Xapo Bank card cost?

The membership is USD 1,000 a year with a full refund within 30 days, and it is the dominant cost. Issuing the metal card is currently free, foreign spending carries “no FX fees and no hidden markups”, Bitcoin spending has no fees, and ATM withdrawals above USD 100 a month cost 2% of the withdrawal amount on top of any operator fee. An additional replacement card within a calendar year is USD 25.

How do I top up the Xapo Bank card?

You top up the account, because the card has no separate balance. Deposit USDC or USDT and they convert to USD automatically; use SWIFT, ACH, RTP or FedACH for dollars, Faster Payments for sterling, SEPA for euros, and Lightning for Bitcoin. Deposit fees and minimum top-ups are not stated on the published pages, and on-chain network charges come from the blockchain, not from Xapo.

Can I use the Xapo Bank card in Apple Pay or Google Pay?

The published pages do not say. Apple Pay and Google Pay support is not disclosed, and the app is a single iOS and Android app with a card freeze control, 24/7. If you live inside your phone’s default wallet, confirm this with support before you rely on it, because a metal card in a drawer and a tokenised phone number are different experiences.

Is the Xapo Bank card safe?

Regulated and partly insured, with the caveats that come with both. It is a custodial Gibraltar bank holding your credentials, USD deposits are guaranteed to GBP 120,000 equivalent, Bitcoin is not covered, and certifications listed are PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3. Two-factor authentication is not mentioned in the card terms. Trustpilot shows 3.9 out of 5 from 1,141 reviews, with 31% one-star, and the recurring themes are account freezes, slow compliance reviews and inability to withdraw.

How do I get a refund or complain?

Support is reached through the app or customersupport.xapo.com, and members have a dedicated Relationship Manager and a complaints page. Note what the terms do not give you: no dispute or chargeback timeframes at all, and refunds usually take up to 10 Business Days, with refunds in unsupported currencies converted at the payment system’s rate at Xapo’s not being liable for the loss. Keep your own records and dates, because the bank will not supply a timeframe.

Is the Xapo Bank card worth it?

For a premium banking client already holding USD, EUR and Bitcoin, and already paying the membership, the card is well made and the foreign-exchange terms are among the better ones in this category. For everyone else, the USD 1,000 annual fee is the answer: it is a banking relationship, not a card. The 30-day full-refund window is your safety net, so use it and decide quickly rather than paying for a year you might not use.

How do I close a Xapo Bank account?

The card terms say closing the account cancels the card, and the card can also be cancelled separately, but they do not state how a remaining balance is handled on closure. Xapo may end the agreement with two months’ written notice. Given the 2026 user reports about being unable to withdraw or close, ask support directly for the closure and withdrawal process in writing before you send any balance.

Content created by the «cryptocardportal.com» team