A Brazilian crypto card that keeps its best cards close to home

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Bipa card is a Mastercard that spends out of a crypto balance, issued in Brazil, priced in reais, and built for people who want Bitcoin cashback on everyday purchases. If you live in Brazil and want a crypto card that behaves like an ordinary payment card, that is exactly what it is. If you are anywhere else, the card’s own pages do not tell you whether you can have one — eligibility conditions are simply not stated in public. That single fact shapes most of what follows.

I score it 5.9 / 10. Not because the product is weak, but because its strength is concentrated in one country and its public pricing is only partly published.

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

Verdict: 5.9 out of 10, built for Brazil

The score is an average of six marks, and the shape of that average matters more than the number itself. Bipa is strong at the things a Brazilian user does every day — topping up, paying, getting rewards — and weak or unknown at everything that depends on being outside Brazil or on published numbers.

Who it suits: Brazilian residents who want Bitcoin cashback in reais, who are comfortable holding crypto or stablecoins, and who mostly spend domestically. The rewards structure is real and tiered, the top-up rails cover both the traditional Brazilian payment system and the main crypto networks, and there is a credit option if you want to buy Bitcoin on credit in up to 3 installments.

Who it does not suit: anyone outside Brazil who needs certainty about eligibility, and anyone who wants to know the full cost of a foreign purchase before making it. Those two gaps are not judgement calls — the pages simply do not publish them.

Will they give you the card?

The honest answer is: the card’s public pages do not say. Eligibility conditions are not stated — no age rule beyond the general one that this is for adult individuals, no list of accepted countries, no residency test I can point you to.

What is clear is the shape of the business. Bipa Intermediação de Ativos Digitais LTDA (CNPJ 37.008.710/0001-78) was founded in 2020 in Brazil and describes itself as both a payment institution and a virtual asset service provider, regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil — a company claim, not something I verified independently. Plans are priced in reais. The credit card is based on Brazilian risk criteria. A Brazilian delivery address is implied throughout.

So the practical reading is that this is a Brazilian product for Brazilian residents. If you are in São Paulo or Recife, your path is straightforward. If you are in Lisbon, Dubai or Nairobi, you should treat the card as unavailable until the company tells you otherwise in writing — which I could not find on its public pages.

One more thing worth knowing here: the card is issued by Stark Bank S.A. Instituicao de Pagamento, described as “responsavel pela emissao dos Cartoes BIPA”. Some Bipa plans are offered with BIPA Instituicao de Pagamento Ltda (CNPJ 40.910.463/0001-05). When a crypto brand and a bank are both named, it matters which one holds your balance, which one runs the wallet, and which one answers a dispute — and here those answers point in different directions.

How to get it

The application is a selfie plus a document at sign-up. Bipa may request updated registration data periodically. The card page says card issuance, use, guarantee and disputes are governed “exclusivamente pelos Termos do Cartão”, and that document was not part of what I read — so treat the terms as the real rulebook, not the marketing page.

Two things you should know before you start:

• Verification is not one-and-done. Stark Bank and Bipa may verify your data at any time. False information can lead to suspension and card cancellation. Read what you type.
• Credit approval is separate. If you want the credit card, the limit is set after prior analysis and follows Bipa’s risk criteria and the Card Terms. There is no published minimum income or score.

Then choose a tier and a card type:

The card exists in both forms. The physical card is free on Pro and Max and carries a fee on Free and Plus — the amount is not stated, so you will not find it on the page, only in support. Delivery time is “per the periods informed by support channels”, with no figure given.

A virtual card also exists, and the prepaid limit can be “enabled in crypto”. Currency is BRL. The credit product is called Bipa Crédito and lets you buy Bitcoin on credit in up to 3 installments.

Support, when you need it, is Portuguese only: in-app chat under profile > “Ajuda e suporte”, a Help Center chat or form with a reply time of up to 24 business hours, social media, and [email protected]. Hours are Monday to Friday 09h–21h and Saturday to Sunday 09h–15h, time zone not stated.

Fees: what a payment really costs

The short version: the monthly plan fee is published, the cost of actually spending the money mostly is not. Card FX and conversion fees are not stated — only plan fees and crypto trading fees appear on the page, with no card-level conversion or FX figure. ATM fees are not stated either. Spending limits are not stated; credit limits follow Bipa’s risk criteria and the Card Terms, with no numbers listed.

Three everyday payments, and what applies:

The coffee in São Paulo. This is the easy one. Domestic spend in reais draws on the prepaid balance or the credit line, and the plan fee is all you can point to as a cost. If you are on Plus, say, R$14.90 a month — waived by usage, so the card pays for itself if you use it enough.

The online subscription in dollars. Foreign use is limited to travel and personal expenses, and only in credit mode. The FX rate “may be higher or lower than the BCB average”. Any conversion or FX fee follows the Tabela de Tarifas and your plan — amounts not listed. IOF on remittance abroad is your responsibility and its rate is not named. So the true cost of a $10 subscription is: the price, multiplied by an unknown rate relative to the BCB average, plus an unlisted fee, plus an unnamed tax.

The ATM withdrawal before a trip. ATM fees are not stated; daily, weekly or monthly limits may be imposed, and the amounts follow the Tabela de Tarifas and your plan. A blocked ATM at the wrong moment is a real cost here, and I cannot tell you the ceiling.

For comparison, and as a check on what “reasonable” looks like in this category: Pay3 lists currency conversion from 1.15%, and foreign exchange, cross-border and foreign transaction fees of up to 3% each. Nexo’s foreign-exchange fee is 0.2% on weekdays in the EEA, UK and Switzerland, 2% elsewhere, rising to 0.7% and 2.5% at weekends. Bipa publishing none of these is not the same as charging them — but from where I sit, it is a genuine gap, and it means you cannot compare Bipa’s foreign-spend cost against anything, including its competitors.

Top up: how the money gets in

This is where Bipa is strongest, and the answer is that you have several genuinely different rails rather than one.

• Pix — native, so the everyday Brazilian transfer works directly.
• Bitcoin — on-chain or Lightning.
• USDT — via Ethereum (ERC-20) or Polygon only. Solana is not accepted for USDT, which is worth repeating: sending USDT over Solana to Bipa is the kind of mistake that support will have to fix for you, and blockchain transfers are irreversible.
• Other networks listed — USDC, SOL, XRP, ETH.
• Cofrinho — minimum R$50.

Then the mechanics. The prepaid card limit may be enabled in crypto, with settlement per Card Terms clause 5.9. The credit card is backed by reais kept as collateral or guarantee. Plan fees are debited from the prepaid limit or from your reais balance. Specific coins and networks for the prepaid top-up are not stated on the page I read, and deposit fees are not stated.

Two things to keep in mind. First, network fees — gas or bandwidth — are charged by the blockchain for your deposit, not by Bipa. Second, if you send on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to another network, the transfer can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. Read the network list twice before sending anything.

There is a guide titled “Como sacar ou transferir Dolar (USDT)” and a US$100,000 limit on international crypto transfers; I read the titles, not the contents, so I cannot tell you how the limit interacts with ordinary withdrawals. On cancellation, Bipa may deduct amounts owed from the available balance, and cancelling the card does not cancel the plan. There is no cancellation fee for either.

Paying with it every day

Bipa is a Mastercard, prepaid and credit, virtual and physical. That combination is what makes it feel ordinary at the till, and it is the reason a Brazilian shop is unlikely to treat it as unusual.

The card “may be enabled in digital wallets according to eligibility”. Apple Pay and Google Pay are not named. If a phone-based wallet is important to you, that is a question to ask support before you pick a plan — not something I could confirm.

Rewards work in two separate ways, and people conflate them:

• Satsback is Bitcoin returned on card purchases, with crypto bought with the card itself excluded. Free 0%, Plus 0.5%, Pro 1%, Max 1.5%. Credit-card rewards post after the invoice is paid; prepaid rewards after settlement.
• Collateral reward is a separate return in BTC on the reais you keep as guarantee: Free 75% of CDI, Plus 100% of CDI up to R$3,000 (90% above that), Pro 110% up to R$5,000 (100% above), Max 115% up to R$5,000 (100% above). It requires an active card.

If you hold reais as collateral, the second line is arguably the bigger number. A CDI-linked return on up to R$5,000 is a different proposition from 1.5% back on coffee.

The app is a company claim, read on 2026-10-20: App Store 4.8, Google Play 4.7, from 20,000+ ratings and 300,000+ downloads. High scores, but self-reported.

Disputes and complaints follow rules you should read once. Unrecognised transactions must be reported within 5 days of the transaction. Stark Bank makes a preliminary analysis, and the final analysis happens “within the period defined by Stark Bank” — no days stated. There is a 7-day right of withdrawal for online purchases. Bipa does not assume responsibility for the outcome of a dispute, and a chargeback reverses your Satsback. One practical note: some transactions the processor classifies as MoneySend are blocked, and no list of blocked merchant category codes is published.

A declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to 7 — a category-wide behaviour, not a Bipa quirk, but it applies to your balance here.

What can go wrong

The most obvious risk is not a scam warning; it is simply that this is a Brazilian product with Brazilian rules and Brazilian numbers. If you cannot verify eligibility for your country, do not assume.

Inside Brazil, the practical risks are:

• Unknown costs at the point of use. Conversion, FX and ATM fees are all unlisted. You can be surprised by a withdrawal abroad.
• Network mistakes with stablecoins. USDT on Solana is not accepted. ERC-20 gas is paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT but no ETH cannot send. Irreversible transfers mean support recovery is manual and not guaranteed.
• Collateral lock-up. If you hold reais as guarantee to raise your credit limit, that money is not spending money. Cancelling a card does not cancel the plan, and Bipa may deduct amounts owed from the available balance on cancellation.
• Verification friction. Data can be re-checked at any time; false information means suspension and card cancellation.
• Wallet-token restrictions. Because the card lives in digital wallets under eligibility rules, a tokenised card number can be restricted by the issuer on magnetic-stripe, phone or website use — and some card-present transactions get declined.
• No published ATM ceiling. Limits “may be imposed” daily, weekly or monthly, and you will not find the numbers.

On security specifically, the issuer is Stark Bank. Three wrong PIN entries block the card, and you unlock it in the app. Report loss or theft to support to get the card blocked. Bipa and Stark Bank “nunca solicitam” passwords — which is a useful thing to know precisely because that is the shape of the scam that will target you. Note the gap: Bipa answers for third-party misuse only after the block is requested, and custody or insurance arrangements are not stated.

If you want the wider context: custodial platforms have a real failure history — Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). Card programmes themselves have been switched off too: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, and WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018. Treat that as background risk, not as a prediction about Bipa.

Nothing negative turned up in complaint searches. A dedicated search for Bipa card complaints on Reclame Aqui and Trustpilot found no pages about Bipa at all. The company claims a 4.8 rating from 26,000+ reviews — marketing, unverified, and not the same as an independent record. Funding is reported on the company’s own page as R$17 million from Ego Death Capital, with no date given.

I want to be careful about how I read that. No complaints found is genuinely ambiguous. It can mean the company is young and small, or it can mean Brazilians resolve complaints through channels a global search does not index. I would not present an empty search result as a clean record.

What to take instead

If you are in Brazil, Bipa is a reasonable choice and I would not push you off it. If you are not, these are the cards to look at first — and note that every one of them publishes more of its numbers than Bipa does.

Reading across the table, three contrasts stand out.

Nexo is the one with the clearest rewards ladder and the most transparent foreign-exchange pricing — 0.2% on a weekday in the EEA is a genuinely low number. Its catch is the $5,000 asset threshold and Gold tier for the physical card, and its cashback only applies in Credit Mode above that same threshold.

Pay3 is the most flexible on entry: no published country list to fall foul of, a $5 issuance fee, and it is the only one here that names Apple Pay and Google Pay cards outright. Its downside is the most punishing fee stack in the category, with up to 3% on three different things.

Exa spans the widest geography — 45 countries and 31 US states — but publishes the least about what things cost, which makes it hard to judge on paper.

Two things to weigh that are not in the table. Nexo’s regulatory picture has a mark on it: not officially, Cointelegraph reported a 2025-era Bulgarian police raid on Nexo’s Sofia office over alleged Russia-sanctions and AML violations, with no official Nexo statement about Russians found. And Pay3’s rule that you must attest you are not a US citizen is unusual enough that you should read it carefully if it applies to you.

One category note that applies to all four: Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves. They license issuers, set the rules, and can suspend a programme. The crypto brand you sign up with is often only a programme manager or front end, which is why reading who your actual issuer is — Stark Bank here — matters.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Bipa if you are a Brazilian resident, you are comfortable holding crypto or stablecoins rather than only fiat, you mostly spend in reais, and you want either Bitcoin back on everyday purchases or a CDI-linked return on reais held as collateral. The Pix rail and the Pro/Max free physical card make the top tiers feel like a normal Brazilian fintech subscription with a crypto bonus attached.

I would think twice if you spend abroad often, if foreign-exchange cost matters to you, if ATM access is your main use case, or if you are outside Brazil. Each of those runs into an unlisted number, and unlisted is different from zero.

I would skip it if you want to hold Bitcoin long-term through a self-custody card, or you are someone for whom a wallet you cannot see the keys to is not acceptable. This is a custodial setup: the platform holds the credentials, so you must trust the provider, and transfers out are irreversible with no built-in recovery. Card safeguards do not change that — a freeze button protects the card, not the keys.

And before any of it, if you are in Brazil: read the Termos do Cartão, because the card page itself points you there for issuance, use, guarantee and disputes. For everyone else, ask support directly whether your country and status are eligible, and get the answer in writing.

Frequently asked questions

What is Bipa card?

Bipa is a Brazilian crypto card: a Mastercard, both prepaid and credit, in virtual and physical form, that spends out of a crypto or stablecoin balance rather than a normal bank account. Plans are priced in reais and tiered Free, Plus, Pro and Max, with the card issued by Stark Bank S.A. Instituicao de Pagamento. It is aimed at Brazilian residents who want crypto-linked spending.

Does Bipa require KYC?

Yes — a selfie plus a document at sign-up, with Bipa and Stark Bank able to verify your data at any time. False information can lead to suspension and card cancellation. The card page says issuance, use, guarantee and disputes are governed by the Termos do Cartão, which were not read for this review, so the terms are the real rulebook.

Is Bipa a bank?

No, not as far as its own description goes. The company is Bipa Intermediação de Ativos Digitais LTDA, founded in Brazil in 2020, describing itself as a payment institution and virtual asset service provider regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil — a company claim. The card itself is issued by Stark Bank S.A. Instituicao de Pagamento, a separate institution.

Can I use the Bipa card outside Brazil?

Foreign use is allowed but restricted: it is limited to travel and personal expenses, and only in credit mode. The exchange rate “may be higher or lower than the BCB average”, conversion and FX fees are not published, and taxes on remittance abroad are your responsibility. Treat the true cost of spending abroad as unknown until you ask support.

How do I top up the Bipa card?

Through Pix natively, Bitcoin on-chain or Lightning, or USDT via Ethereum (ERC-20) or Polygon — Solana is not accepted for USDT. USDC, SOL, XRP and ETH networks are also listed, and Cofrinho takes a minimum of R$50. Network fees are charged by the blockchain, and a wrong network can mean a lost transfer.

Is the Bipa card free?

It can be. The Free plan costs R$0 per month and the fee is waived by usage on paid plans too. But the physical card is free only on Pro and Max; Free and Plus carry an issue or shipping fee whose amount is not stated, and conversion, FX and ATM fees are not stated at all. So “free” describes the entry plan, not the total cost.

Can I add Bipa to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?

The card “may be enabled in digital wallets according to eligibility”, which is not the same as a confirmed integration. Neither Apple Pay nor Google Pay is named on the pages I read. If phone-based payment is essential for you, confirm it with support before choosing a plan, because the issuer can also restrict where a tokenised card number is accepted.

How do I withdraw money from Bipa?

There is a guide titled “Como sacar ou transferir Dolar (USDT)” and a US$100,000 limit on international crypto transfers, though I read only the titles. Cancelling costs nothing, but Bipa may deduct amounts owed from your available balance, and cancelling the card does not cancel the plan. Remember that blockchain transfers are irreversible once sent.

Is the Bipa card safe?

Use it the way you would use any custodial card, because that is what it is. Three wrong PIN entries block the card and you unlock it in the app, and Bipa and Stark Bank say they never ask for passwords — a useful warning, since that is the shape of the scam that will target you. Custody and insurance arrangements are not stated, and Bipa answers for third-party misuse only after you request the block.

Is Bipa worth it?

For a Brazilian resident spending mostly in reais on Pro or Max — free physical card, Satsback of up to 1.5% and a collateral reward of up to 115% of CDI — the value proposition is clear. If you travel, withdraw cash or live outside Brazil, the missing fee and eligibility information makes the card hard to evaluate before you sign up, and that is exactly why my score sits where it does.

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