A prepaid Visa for Canadians who want to spend from a Shakepay balance

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Shakepay card is a prepaid Visa that draws on a Shakepay account balance in Canadian dollars and pays up to 1.5% cashback in bitcoin on eligible purchases. It is one of the simplest crypto-linked cards on the market for a Canadian reader, because the spend currency is a plain CAD balance rather than a coin you have to convert at the till. That simplicity comes with hard limits: the card is Canada-only, it is a prepaid product rather than a credit card, and Shakepay’s own customer reviews outside the card specifically are poor, with account-freeze complaints that any prospective user should read before applying.

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

Verdict

Shakepay scores 4.3 out of 10. That is a low average driven mostly by where the card is available (Canada only) and how narrow the top-up story is (CAD in, mostly via Interac e-Transfer), and lifted by a clean everyday-payments experience. If you live in Canada, hold a Shakepay account, and want bitcoin cashback on a prepaid card, it does the job. If you are anywhere else, you cannot get one, and the product is not built for you.

For a Canadian resident who already uses Shakepay to buy bitcoin, this is a frictionless way to add a Visa prepaid to your wallet and pick up a small bitcoin reward on every spend. For anyone else, the card is not on the table.

Who will they give you the card

The card is available to all Shakepay customers in all 13 Canadian provinces and territories, and only in Canada. That is the headline fact; everything else is detail. Shakepay is a Canadian money services business and a CIRO-registered investment dealer, so the card programme is built around Canadian residency rather than around citizenship, but the cardholder agreement does not spell residency out in so many words, and Shakepay’s own card page lists Canada as the only market.

Some countries and merchants are restricted, and Shakepay tells you to email [email protected] if you want to check a specific case. That is the only channel they give you for eligibility questions, and it is unofficial in the sense that nothing on the public page spells out the restrictions.

To be eligible you need a fully verified Shakepay account and to be at the age of majority in your province or territory. One card per person, and Shakepay runs an eligibility questionnaire in the app before you can order. There is no credit check, which matters if you have a thin or bruised credit file; it is also a clue that this is not a credit product.

The documents Shakepay asks for to reach “fully verified” (proof of address, government ID, and similar) are not stated on the card pages themselves, and neither is the processing time, the verification tiers, or the reasons an application might be rejected. If you are partway through verifying your account, that is the part to chase first; ordering a card before your account is fully verified is not an option.

How to get it

Setup takes minutes, and there is no credit check. The path is: open and fully verify a Shakepay account, run through the in-app eligibility questionnaire, order the physical Visa Prepaid Card, and set a PIN during the ordering flow.

The card arrives by Canada Post regular mail within 21 days. There is no tracking. Shakepay says it is delivered “regardless of where you live in Canada”, which is the only geographic reassurance on the public pages; the cardholder agreement and the help centre do not list shipping outside Canada, so the practical answer to “can I get one sent to a forwarding address” is that the programme is not set up for it.

The card is free for fully verified accounts, and Shakepay does not publish an issuance fee for other cases. A damaged card keeps the same number, expiry and CVV, so you carry your balance and history over; a lost or stolen card gets new details. Replacements go through the “Replace card” option in the app, and Shakepay aims to reissue within 30 days of you reporting the loss. The replacement fee is not stated on the page I read.

A few things the order flow does not tell you: whether a virtual card is offered alongside the physical one, whether a metal version exists, and how the rewards status is set when you first order. The help article on reward statuses describes Base as the default tier, so a new card lands on Base unless the monthly qualifying activity has already pushed you up.

What it really costs — Fees

There is no annual fee, and the card itself is free for fully verified accounts; Shakepay does not publish an issuance fee. The interesting money is in the foreign-exchange charge and the cashback tier, because both depend on the rewards status you hold in a given calendar month.

The card’s home currency is the Canadian dollar, and any non-Canadian transaction is converted at the Visa rate plus a Foreign Exchange Charge. The cardholder agreement lists that charge as 3%. The help centre breaks the same number down by tier: 3% on Base, 1.5% on Bright, 0% on Blue. Refunds on foreign transactions use the rate paid to Visa minus the charge, so a refund will usually be a smaller CAD amount than you originally paid. The card does not hold a multi-currency balance, so there is no in-app way to lock in a rate before you travel.

Help-centre language from 21 April 2026 says these limits cannot be increased; an earlier article reportedly had different figures, which Shakepay has since superseded.

Three everyday payments

A coffee in Toronto on the Shakepay app: nothing added on top. You are spending the CAD balance with Visa’s wholesale rate and no foreign-exchange charge because the merchant is in Canada. The only cost is the cashback you did not earn on a Base tier, which is effectively 1% of the purchase you gave up to receive bitcoin later.

A €40 dinner in Paris on Base: 3% on the euro amount, converted at the Visa rate, then settled against your CAD balance. On a €40 tab that is roughly €1.20 in FX, plus whatever spread the Visa rate itself carries. The same dinner on Blue would be €0 in FX, but you would have to clear the monthly qualifying activity first.

A $200 ATM withdrawal at a PLUS-logo ATM in Mexico on Base: 3% FX on the local-currency amount, then converted to CAD, plus any fee the ATM operator charges on top. The cap is $500 per transaction and $1,000 per day, and Shakepay does not pay bitcoin rewards on ATM cash, so a $200 ATM run is purely a cost exercise.

The pattern is the same in each case: the card is cheapest in Canada, on Blue, and at merchants; it is most expensive abroad, on Base, and at third-party ATMs. If you are thinking of using it as a travel card, the tier you sit on matters more than the headline “no annual fee”.

How to top it up — Top up

The card spends a Shakepay account balance in Canadian dollars, and topping the card up means topping the account up. Shakepay does not describe a separate “add to card” flow, and it does not name the coins or networks that fund the card directly, so the practical answer is: get CAD into the Shakepay account, and the card will spend it.

The two main funding paths are Interac e-Transfer and wire transfer. Interac e-Transfer in is free, arrives in minutes, with a $5 minimum and a $10,000 maximum per transfer. Wire transfer in is free, takes one to two working days, and has a $10,000 minimum. There is no activation fee and no minimum balance to keep the card alive. If you want to fund the card from crypto, the path is to sell into CAD inside Shakepay first, then let the card spend the resulting balance; the help centre does not describe a direct crypto-to-card flow.

Two practical consequences of that model. First, because the card holds CAD, your bitcoin exposure lives in the Shakepay app rather than on the card, and your rewards are paid into the BTC balance on top of whatever you already hold there. Second, if you close the card, the Shakepay wallet balance stays accessible; funds do not expire with the card. Withdrawal fees from the wallet are not officially stated, which is one of the places Shakepay’s documentation is thinner than peers.

Paying with it every day

Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported “where available”, which is the wording Shakepay uses rather than a country list. A blocked-merchant list is not stated on the card page, so the assumption is that standard Visa prepaid rules apply: gambling, adult content, and some quasi-cash merchants tend to be restricted, but Shakepay does not publish the list.

The rewards headline is up to 1.5% cashback in bitcoin on eligible purchases at eligible merchants worldwide. The word “eligible” does a lot of work there: ATM withdrawals, for example, do not earn bitcoin rewards, and neither do blocked categories. Cashback is credited automatically to your BTC balance and is withdrawable to a user wallet, so you are not forced to hold the bitcoin with Shakepay.

The rewards tier you sit on changes the headline, not the structure:

• Base (default): 1% cashback, 3% FX charge.
• Bright (exchange $100+ or receive $200+ in eligible direct deposits in the calendar month): 1% cashback, 1.5% FX charge.
• Blue (exchange $1,000+ or receive $2,000+ in eligible direct deposits in the calendar month): 1.5% cashback, 0% FX charge, priority support.
• Business: automatic; details not described on the card page.

The day-to-day management goes through the Shakepay mobile app: card controls, lock/freeze, support chat, and the dispute section. If disputes are your worry, the rules are spelt out: notify Shakepay in writing within 60 days of the transaction through the in-app dispute section, and be aware the cardholder agreement also says disputes must be received within 90 days or the transaction is deemed accepted. Visa Zero Liability claims for unauthorised use can take up to 120 days after paperwork, may require a police investigation, and any transactions that went through before you reported the card lost or stolen may be treated as yours. If Shakepay’s support cannot resolve a complaint, the ombudsman route is OBSI at 1-888-451-4519, or the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada at 1-866-461-3222.

What can go wrong

The card is issued by Peoples Trust Company under licence from Visa International, with Shakepay as the programme manager. Shakepay itself is registered with FINTRAC as a money services business (#M17065696) and is a CIRO member and an investment dealer registered with the AMF and provincial regulators. None of that makes Shakepay a bank, and Shakepay wallet balances are not CDIC-insured, which is the single most important fact to know before you park more than incidental cash in the account.

The card security toolkit is the usual one: instant lock and freeze in the app, two-factor authentication, and a lost-and-stolen line at 1-855-574-2539 that runs 24/7. The PIN is set during the order flow and cannot be changed later; if you need a new PIN, you replace the card. Three wrong PIN entries can disable the PIN, and Shakepay does not describe a self-service PIN reset. The balance is custodial, which means Shakepay holds the funds and you trust them to hold it; the upside is that you can freeze the card instantly, the downside is that you are exposed to Shakepay as a counterparty.

The complaint picture is the part that any careful reader should look at. On Trustpilot, Shakepay reads 2.3 out of 5 from 22 reviews, with only one of those reviews mentioning the card (a positive one from December 2021). The themes that come up across the Shakepay product are not card-specific, but they matter if the same compliance and support team handles cardholders: accounts frozen or closed without a clear reason (2021, early 2022, mid-2025), support that goes quiet for days at a time (2021, December 2023, mid-2025), delayed or blocked withdrawals and wires (2022-2023), funds not returned including a $250 bill payment that did not arrive (September 2026), and source-of-funds questioning that can stall an account (November 2022). An unofficial review on CryptoCardHub (11 August 2026) cites Trustpilot at about 1.5/5, which does not match what I read directly; take the unofficial number with a grain of salt.

The card itself has no published incident list, and I did not find a user-side report of a card-specific failure. The pattern above is the worst-case-scenario list to read before you load significant CAD into the account.

The recent change log is small but useful. The physical-card order flow was moved into a general order path (help article 16221106); the card limits help article was updated on 21 April 2026; the rewards-status article was updated on 31 August 2026. An unofficial note from CryptoCardHub (11 August 2026) says the physical-card rollout was opened gradually by waitlist rank and announced in May 2026, but the official help article I read does not mention a waitlist, so treat the waitlist claim as unofficial.

What to take instead

If the Shakepay card is not a fit, three other products turn up next to it in the same category, with very different shapes. The table compares them on the points most readers actually use to choose.

The Gemini card is a credit card paid off in fiat, with rewards paid in crypto, so it sits in a different bucket: a credit card with a crypto reward, rather than a card you load with crypto. It is worth looking at if you can qualify for a credit card and want category-based rewards rather than flat bitcoin cashback. The catch is that the residency rules are not stated on the page I read, so the same “is this available where I live” question applies.

Lava is the strongest card in the comparison if you live outside Canada. It is sold as spending at 150 million merchants in 150+ countries, with no FX fees and no FX spread, and up to 5% back in bitcoin. The information on the card page is thin: there is no country list, no fee schedule, and the conditions on the 5% are not stated. Treat the headline as marketing until you can read the small print for your own country.

Trastra is a prepaid debit card at Visa merchants, top-up from a Mover wallet in crypto, and is listed in 31 countries including the UK, France and Germany, with a stated intention to cover the full EEA. Non-European residents are “not at the moment”. Fees and rewards are not stated on the card page.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Shakepay card to a Canadian resident who already keeps CAD in a Shakepay account, wants a Visa prepaid to add to Apple Pay or Google Pay, and is happy with bitcoin cashback in the 1% to 1.5% range. If you are on Blue, the lack of an FX charge makes the card genuinely usable for trips outside Canada within the $5,000-per-day spend cap, and the ATM access at PLUS machines is a useful backup.

I would not recommend it to anyone outside Canada, since the card is not available to you. I would be cautious about it for anyone planning to keep a large balance in the Shakepay wallet, because the balances are not CDIC-insured and the Trustpilot pattern around account freezes, closures and delayed withdrawals is the kind of thing you do not want to discover with rent money in the account. And I would not recommend it as a primary travel card on Base, where the 3% FX charge adds up quickly; if the monthly tier does not push you to Blue, a card with no FX fee is a better default for foreign spending.

The simplest way to think about it: Shakepay the card is a small, well-defined prepaid card that does what it says, for a small, well-defined audience. If you are inside that audience, it is a useful add-on to a Shakepay account. If you are not, the card is not the right product, and the alternatives above are where to look.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Shakepay card?

The Shakepay card is a physical Visa Prepaid Card that spends the Canadian-dollar balance of a Shakepay account. It is issued by Peoples Trust Company under licence from Visa, and it pays cashback in bitcoin on eligible purchases. It is prepaid, not a credit card, so it cannot overdraw and there is no credit check.

How does the Shakepay card work?

You fund a Shakepay account in Canadian dollars, mostly through Interac e-Transfer or wire transfer, and the card draws on that CAD balance at the till. Non-Canadian transactions are converted at the Visa rate plus a foreign-exchange charge that depends on your monthly tier: 3% on Base, 1.5% on Bright, 0% on Blue. Cashback arrives in your BTC balance in the app.

Is Shakepay a bank?

No. Shakepay is a Canadian money services business registered with FINTRAC (#M17065696) and a CIRO-registered investment dealer. Shakepay wallet balances are not CDIC-insured, which means they are not protected the way a Canadian bank deposit is. The card is issued by Peoples Trust Company under licence from Visa, not by Shakepay itself.

Who owns Shakepay?

Shakepay the company is a CIRO-registered investment dealer and a FINTRAC-registered money services business; the card programme sits between Shakepay, Peoples Trust Company as issuer, and Visa as the network. The formal ownership structure is not published on Shakepay’s public pages.

Is the Shakepay card available in the United States, the UK, or Europe?

No, the card is only available to Shakepay customers in all 13 Canadian provinces and territories. Some countries and merchants are restricted, and Shakepay’s only published channel for an eligibility check is [email protected], which is unofficial. If you are outside Canada, the alternatives section above is the realistic comparison set.

How do I apply for the Shakepay card?

You open and fully verify a Shakepay account, run the in-app eligibility questionnaire, and order the physical card from the app. Setup takes minutes, there is no credit check, and the card arrives by Canada Post regular mail within 21 days, with no tracking. The card is free for fully verified accounts.

Does the Shakepay card require KYC?

Yes, in the sense that you need a fully verified Shakepay account to be eligible, and Shakepay verifies identity under Canadian anti-money-laundering rules. The exact documents and processing time are not stated on the card pages I read, so the practical step is to complete the verification on the Shakepay app first and then order the card once you are fully verified.

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

Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported “where available” on the Shakepay card pages, which is the wording Shakepay uses rather than a country list. The standard path is to add the card through the wallet app on your phone after the physical card is active. The contactless tap limit is $250, and there is no published way to raise it.

Is the Shakepay card safe?

The card comes with the usual Visa prepaid safeguards: instant lock and freeze in the app, two-factor authentication, 3-D Secure on online payments, and a 24/7 lost-and-stolen line at 1-855-574-2539. Shakepay’s Trustpilot score is 2.3 out of 5, with complaints about account freezes, closures and delayed withdrawals, and Shakepay wallet balances are not CDIC-insured. The card-specific safety record is cleaner than the broader Shakepay reviews suggest, but the wallet-level risks still apply.

Is the Shakepay card worth it?

It depends on where you live and how you use it. For a Canadian Shakepay customer who is happy to operate on Bright or Blue, the card is a low-cost way to add a Visa prepaid to Apple Pay and pick up bitcoin cashback, and the lack of an FX charge on Blue makes it usable abroad within the spend cap. For anyone outside Canada, or for a user who plans to keep a large balance in the Shakepay wallet, the card is the wrong tool.

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