The Bipa card, walked through from eligibility to everyday use

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Bipa is a Brazilian crypto platform that sells a Mastercard prepaid card and a credit card, plus a savings function paid out in Bitcoin. The card sits on top of a reais-denominated account: you fund it from crypto, from Pix, or from a guarantee held in reais, and the network transaction is settled in fiat. The point of this review is to walk through what that arrangement actually costs, who it suits, and where the gaps in the public information are, because for a card that has been live since 2020, the published detail is unusually thin.

This page is a review, not a sign-up guide. Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

Bipa scores 5.9 out of 10 in this review. The score reflects a card that does one job well — turning Bitcoin into everyday spending in Brazil — and stumbles on almost everything else. It is Brazil-first in language, currency, support hours and pricing. The fee structure for spending abroad is not published, KYC and eligibility details are not published, and the card sits in a regulatory niche where the crypto side and the payment side are run by different licensed entities. For a Brazilian resident who wants Satsback in reais and a Pix-funded card, it is a reasonable option. For anyone else, the lack of an international answer is the main reason the score lands where it does.

The audience this card actually serves is narrow and worth stating upfront: Brazilian residents who want Bitcoin cashback on card spending paid in reais, who are comfortable funding from Pix or from their own Bitcoin wallet, and who do not need the card to behave like a travel card abroad. If that is not you, the rest of the review explains which sections will hurt.

Who will they give you the card

The honest answer to “who can get a Bipa card” is that the card pages do not state eligibility. What they make clear through context is that this is a Brazilian product. The company behind the platform is Bipa Intermediação de Ativos Digitais LTDA, a Brazilian company founded in 2020, described as both a payment institution and a virtual asset service provider regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil. The plans are priced in reais. The credit card is underwritten on what Bipa calls Brazilian risk criteria. The support hours are in Portuguese.

That is enough to know that applying from outside Brazil is a long shot. The pages do not list a country list, a residency requirement, a minimum age beyond an adult individual, or a sanctions screen. They do state that the credit limit is set after prior analysis by Bipa and that any credit increase requires a separate deposit and a guarantee to be enabled.

Two practical consequences follow.

First, if you are not a Brazilian resident, the card is almost certainly not for you, and you should not try to work around that. The page does not promise a path for non-residents, and signing up with documents that misrepresent where you live is the surest way to get the account closed.

Second, even inside Brazil, you do not know in advance what the credit limit will be, what documents will be requested, or how long approval will take, because the numbers and timelines are not on the page. The pages talk about a selfie and a document at sign-up, the right of Bipa and Stark Bank to verify that data at any time, and the requirement to be an adult individual. They do not name the accepted documents, the processing time, or the verification levels.

For the audience this card is built for, the residency question has a clean answer; for everyone else, the right move is to look at the alternatives section.

How to get it

The published sign-up flow is a sketch rather than a full procedure. You go through KYC at sign-up, which means a selfie and a government-issued document. After that, Bipa and Stark Bank can ask for updated information periodically. The card itself is issued in two flavours: a prepaid card and a credit card called Bipa Crédito that lets you buy Bitcoin on credit in up to three instalments. Both come as a virtual card; a physical card exists and is free on the Pro and Max plans, paid on Free and Plus, with the fee amount not stated.

The card tier is determined by your plan: Free and Plus on the Mastercard Gold tier, Pro on Platinum, Max on Black. A virtual card can be created and the prepaid limit can be “enabled in crypto”, which means you set aside crypto to back a reais balance. The credit card is backed by reais kept as collateral or guarantee, and you can ask to lift the credit limit by enabling that guarantee.

Card delivery is described as happening “per the periods informed by support channels” with no number on the page, and the address is implicitly Brazilian. The card terms are said to govern the issuance, use, guarantee and disputes of the card “exclusively”, and those terms were not read for this review.

A few details that matter for a first-time user:

• Activation is done in the app after the card arrives or, for a virtual card, immediately.
• The PIN blocks after three wrong attempts; you unlock it in the app.
• The card is enrolled in 3-D Secure, which means an extra confirmation step on most online payments.
• Disputes have to be reported within five days of the transaction. After a preliminary check by Stark Bank, the final analysis happens within a window that is not defined on the page.

That last point is the one that tends to bite first-time users. The card terms say Bipa is not responsible for the outcome of a dispute, and that a chargeback reverses the Satsback reward. So if you dispute a payment, you also lose the Bitcoin you would have earned on it. This is a quiet but real cost of using the card.

What it really costs: Fees

The headline cost structure is the plan fee. There are four plans and the monthly fee is waived partly by spending on the card.

The Satsback is paid in Bitcoin and is excluded from the spending used to buy crypto with the card. On the credit card the Satsback is paid after the invoice is paid; on the prepaid card it is paid after settlement.

Outside this table, the published fee schedule is thin. There is no published FX rate or conversion fee. There is no published ATM fee. There is no published fee for international spending, even though the card terms say that foreign use is allowed in credit mode for travel and personal expenses, and that the FX rate “may be higher or lower than the BCB average rate”. IOF, the Brazilian tax on foreign-exchange transactions, is not named. The Tabela de Tarifas and the plan are referenced, but the amounts are not listed on the page. Crypto trading fees exist on the platform but are separate from the card.

That gap matters because it means you cannot budget for a trip. You know the plan fee in advance; you do not know what the card will charge you at a Paris café.

Three everyday payments

A few worked examples, built from what the pages do and do not say:

Coffee in São Paulo, paid with the prepaid card funded from Pix. The merchant sees a domestic Mastercard transaction. Plan fee is paid monthly regardless. Satsback is 0% on Free, 0.5% on Plus, 1% on Pro, 1.5% on Max. No FX fee because the purchase is in reais.

Online subscription paid from the credit card in reais. Same Satsback as above, posted after the invoice is paid. No FX fee. If you dispute the transaction and a chargeback is issued, the Satsback on that purchase is reversed.

A hotel in Lisbon paid on the credit card in euros. The card terms say this is allowed, and they warn that the FX rate may differ from the BCB average. The page does not give a percentage. IOF is the user’s responsibility but the rate is not on the page. Satsback in Bitcoin still applies, but is paid in BTC at whatever BTC price applied on the day the invoice is paid.

The second and third examples are the ones where the absence of a published fee will catch you out. The card pages do not say what the FX markup is, and they do not say whether the Satsback is enough to offset it. If you spend abroad on the credit card, the only way to find out what you are paying is to test a small transaction and read the statement.

How to top it up: Top up

The funding model depends on which card you have. The prepaid card’s balance can be “enabled in crypto” — you set crypto aside to back a reais balance, and the card spends that balance. The credit card is backed by reais kept as collateral or guarantee, and the credit limit is set by Bipa against that collateral.

Top-up channels, as published:

• Pix, the Brazilian instant payment system, as a native option.
• Bitcoin, on-chain or via the Lightning Network.
• USDT, but only on Ethereum (ERC-20) or Polygon. USDT on Solana is explicitly not accepted.
• USDC, SOL, XRP and ETH, with networks listed on the platform.
• A “Cofrinho” feature, which is a savings jar in the app, with a R$50 minimum.

The platform does not publish a deposit fee for any of these channels. The on-chain cost is the network’s own gas or resource fee, paid to the blockchain rather than to Bipa, and that is the main reason the supported network list matters: an ERC-20 USDT transfer pays ETH gas, a Polygon transfer pays MATIC, and sending USDT to a Solana address by mistake is the kind of error that support may or may not be able to recover.

The published list also has a gap. There is no mention of bank transfer, no cash top-up at a partner, no Apple Pay or Google Pay funding flow. There is a US$100,000 limit on international crypto transfers, mentioned in passing on a guide page, with no further detail.

A few practical rules that follow from what is published:

• Match the network exactly. USDT on Tron is not supported; USDT on Polygon is.
• Keep some native token in the wallet you send from. An ERC-20 USDT transfer without enough ETH to pay gas will not move.
• Cancellation is not a clean exit. The card terms say Bipa may deduct amounts owed from the available balance when the card is cancelled, and that cancelling the card does not cancel the plan. So if you walk away, you may leave a small loose end.

Paying with it every day

The day-to-day experience of using the Bipa card is shaped by three things: the network, the prepaid-versus-credit split, and the Satsback.

The network is Mastercard, which is the main reason the card works in the volume of places that accept Mastercard. The tier — Gold, Platinum or Black — depends on the plan, but tier is a network-level badge rather than a separate acceptance network. A Gold Mastercard is accepted wherever Mastercard is accepted; the tier shows up on the card design and sometimes unlocks issuer-side perks.

The prepaid-versus-credit split matters because each card behaves differently. The prepaid card spends from a loaded balance, cannot overdraw, and its Satsback posts after settlement. The credit card spends against a credit limit set by Bipa, can buy Bitcoin in up to three instalments, and its Satsback posts after the invoice is paid. The credit card is the one that works abroad, in the card terms’ framing, because foreign use is limited to travel and personal expenses in credit mode.

Satsback in Bitcoin is the most unusual feature. Free pays 0%, Plus 0.5%, Pro 1%, Max 1.5%. Crypto bought with the card is excluded from the Satsback calculation, so the rate applies to ordinary retail spending. On top of that, the reais held as guarantee earn a separate reward in BTC, with rates between 75% of CDI (the Brazilian interbank rate) on Free and 115% of CDI up to R$5,000 on Max. To collect the guarantee reward, the card has to be active.

Digital wallet support is the everyday-use point where the published detail is thinnest. The card pages say the card “may be enabled in digital wallets according to eligibility”, which is a careful way of saying yes, but not for everyone, and not on every wallet. Apple Pay and Google Pay are not named. Some transactions classified by the processor as MoneySend are blocked, but the page does not name a blocked merchant category code (MCC) list.

A few everyday-use details that the page does state:

• App ratings: the company claims an App Store rating of 4.8, a Google Play rating of 4.7 from over 20,000 ratings, and 300,000+ downloads. These are company claims and are not independently verified.
• 3-D Secure is on, which means a confirmation step on most online payments.
• A hold on funds from a declined authorisation can stay for a few days, which is the network’s standard window and is worth knowing if you are budgeting tightly.
• Disputes have to be reported within five days of the transaction.

The everyday-use experience, in other words, is “Mastercard, with some specific Bipa features layered on, and several gaps in the published detail”.

What can go wrong

The risk section is the one that needs the most honesty about what the public record does and does not show.

On the company side, the information is unusually complete. Bipa Intermediação de Ativos Digitais LTDA has a CNPJ of 37.008.710/0001-78, was founded in 2020, and is described as both a payment institution and a virtual asset service provider regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil. The card issuer is Stark Bank S.A. Instituicao de Pagamento, named on the card pages. Plans are offered with a separate entity, BIPA Instituicao de Pagamento Ltda (CNPJ 40.910.463/0001-05). The company has raised R$17 million from Ego Death Capital, mentioned on its own page with no date. There is no dated news feed on the page, and no dated events were found.

On the complaints side, the public record is thin in a way that needs to be read carefully. A dedicated search for “Bipa card reclamações” on Reclame Aqui and for Bipa on Trustpilot found no pages. The company markets a 4.8 rating from over 26,000 reviews, but this is a marketing claim and is not independently verified. A lack of complaints pages is not a clean bill of health: it can mean the product is too small to attract attention, that complaints go through a different channel, or that the company is simply not on those platforms yet.

On the security side, the published detail is at the level you would expect for a regulated card. The PIN blocks after three wrong attempts and is unlocked in the app. Loss or theft is reported to support, which then blocks the card. The card pages emphasise that Bipa and Stark Bank never ask for passwords. Liability for third-party misuse starts from the moment the user asks for the block; the card is not covered for transactions that happened before the report. Custody insurance, if any, is not stated.

The other risks are quieter but more constant:

• FX exposure. The card terms say the FX rate may differ from the BCB average, and IOF is the user’s responsibility. A cardholder spending abroad is taking an unquantified foreign-exchange markup.
• Network fee on the wrong chain. Sending USDT to a Solana address when the card only supports USDT on Polygon is a recoverable mistake in some wallets and a lost deposit in others.
• Reward reversal on chargeback. Disputing a transaction reverses the Satsback, which means you can lose the Bitcoin reward on a successful dispute.
• Plan-only cancellation. Closing the card does not close the plan, which is a small administrative risk for users who treat “I cancelled the card” as the end of the relationship.
• Counterparty risk on the crypto side. Bipa holds custody of the crypto you fund the card with, and crypto held by a custodian is exposed to the kind of failure that has hit every other major custodian at some point.

The last point is worth being explicit about. The prepaid card funded from crypto is, mechanically, a stablecoin-like balance denominated in reais and backed by crypto held by Bipa. The credit card is backed by reais held as collateral, also under Bipa’s control. In both cases, the cardholder is exposed to Bipa and Stark Bank as counterparties, on top of the issuer risk that any prepaid or credit card carries.

What to take instead

Three alternatives to consider, in increasing order of how confident the published detail is.

Sponge is the most experimental of the three. It is a virtual card, described on its homepage as a credit card issued by Rain, a Visa Principal Member, and created through a createSpongeCard call. Funding is from a USDC collateral moved from the Sponge wallet with card fund, with the example chain being Base. Cost, fees, eligibility and rewards are not stated. The score on this site is 4.9 out of 10. The right reader is a developer who is already in the Sponge wallet and wants a quick card to spend USDC. Anyone who needs a published fee schedule should look elsewhere.

Nexo is the more traditional option. The card is virtual and physical, Mastercard-branded, issued by DiPocket UAB. It is available to residents and citizens of “selected European countries, including the EEA and the United Kingdom”; the country list is not on the page and the excluded jurisdictions are not named. Cashback in NEXO token or Bitcoin is paid on Credit Mode purchases, and the rate depends on the loyalty tier. The card has a published FX fee of 0.2% on weekdays in the EEA, UK and Switzerland, and 2% elsewhere, with a higher weekend rate; this is the kind of detail the Bipa pages do not give. The score on this site is 6.3 out of 10. The right reader is a European Nexo account holder who wants a Mastercard that is honest about its fees.

Xplace is the most international. The card is Visa, virtual and physical, with the physical card on Silver live and on Gold and Platinum rolling out. Spending happens in Cash mode (stablecoin balance) or Credit mode (borrowing against holdings). The annual fee is published for the first time, ranging from free on Basic to $999 on Platinum, with a “0% FX on Platinum” claim for the top tier. Funding is on the Solana network, with cbBTC, wETH, SOL, JitoSOL, USDC, USDT and xStocks accepted. Cashback in USDC ranges from 0.5% on Basic to 2% on Platinum in Credit mode. The score on this site is 7.7 out of 10. The right reader is a Solana-native user who wants a Visa with a published fee table and stablecoin cashback.

A short comparison, with the figures exactly as published:

The honest read is that Bipa and Nexo score similarly for opposite reasons. Bipa has the more interesting crypto and rewards design but the more opaque fees. Nexo has the duller product and the more honest fee disclosure. Xplace is the more international of the three and the most useful comparison for a non-Brazilian reader.

Who I would recommend it to

The recommendation comes with a caveat that the card pages do not give enough detail to be confident about edge cases.

The card is the right pick for a Brazilian resident with a Pix-funded wallet, who wants to spend reais and earn Satsback in Bitcoin, and who does not need the card to work abroad. In that case the Free and Plus plans are the cheapest entry, and Pro is the right pick once the physical card fee is worth the Platinum tier and the 1% Satsback. Max only makes sense for users who will spend enough each month to clear the R$99.90 fee and who want the concierge WhatsApp support.

The card is the wrong pick for anyone outside Brazil, for anyone who needs to budget a foreign trip, and for anyone who values fee transparency over Bitcoin rewards. Nexo is the right comparison for European readers; Xplace is the right comparison for non-European readers who can fund on Solana. Sponge is the right comparison for developers already in that ecosystem.

A final point: the absence of a complaints trail on Reclame Aqui and Trustpilot is not the same as a clean record. It is a sign that the product has not been stress-tested at scale in public, and that the Bipa-and-Stark-Bank arrangement is doing the work in private. If you are the kind of person who reads a complaints page before signing up, that information is not available for this card.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Bipa card?

The Bipa card is a Mastercard prepaid and credit card issued by Stark Bank S.A. Instituicao de Pagamento, sold by the Brazilian crypto platform Bipa. It spends in reais, can be funded from Pix, Bitcoin, USDT on Ethereum or Polygon, USDC, SOL, XRP and ETH, and pays a Satsback reward in Bitcoin on card spending.

Is Bipa a bank?

No. Bipa is a crypto platform and a payment institution regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil. The card itself is issued by Stark Bank, a separate licensed payment institution, which is the entity that holds the card programme under Mastercard’s licence.

Who owns Bipa?

Bipa Intermediação de Ativos Digitais LTDA (CNPJ 37.008.710/0001-78) is the company behind the platform, founded in 2020. The company has raised R$17 million from Ego Death Capital, mentioned on the company page without a date. The card issuer is Stark Bank.

Is the Bipa card available in my country?

The card pages do not publish a country list. The company is Brazilian, the plans are priced in reais, the support is in Portuguese, and the credit card is underwritten on Brazilian risk criteria. In practice the card is built for Brazilian residents, and the public information does not point to a path for non-residents.

How do I apply for a Bipa card?

You download the app, complete KYC with a selfie and a government-issued document, and pick a plan. The card is then issued as a virtual card; a physical card follows on Pro and Max (free) or on Free and Plus (paid). Card delivery time is “per the periods informed by support channels”.

Does the Bipa card require KYC?

Yes. The published sign-up flow is a selfie and a document, with Bipa and Stark Bank retaining the right to verify the data at any time and to ask for updated information periodically. The full list of accepted documents and the processing time are not on the page.

How do I top up the Bipa card?

The prepaid card can be “enabled in crypto” and topped up from Bitcoin, USDT on Ethereum or Polygon, USDC, SOL, XRP or ETH, or via Pix. The credit card is funded by reais kept as collateral or guarantee. USDT on Solana is not accepted. On-chain network fees are paid to the blockchain, not to Bipa.

Is the Bipa card free?

The Free plan has no monthly fee. Plus, Pro and Max are R$14.90, R$49.90 and R$99.90 per month, partially waived by spending. The physical card is free on Pro and Max, paid on Free and Plus, with the fee amount not published. FX, ATM and the small-print fees are not published.

Can I add the Bipa card to Apple Pay or Google Pay?

The card pages say the card “may be enabled in digital wallets according to eligibility”, which is a careful way of saying yes for some users, on some wallets. Apple Pay and Google Pay are not named on the page, so this is a question for support before you plan on tap-to-pay.

Is the Bipa card safe?

The card sits inside a regulated structure: Bipa is registered with the Central Bank of Brazil, Stark Bank is the licensed issuer, and the card uses 3-D Secure, a PIN with a three-attempt lock, and a standard loss-and-theft block on request. The published detail on custody insurance and on what is covered in a dispute is thin, so treat it like a card from a small issuer rather than a card from a major bank.

Content created by the «cryptocardfacts» team