Brighty card review

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

You might be looking at Brighty because an ordinary bank card is hard to come by where you live, or because you hold crypto and want a card that spends it directly. Either way, you want to know what Brighty actually does, what it charges, and where the rough edges are. I went through Brighty’s own pages, the help center, user reports and the regulatory backdrop, and what follows is a walk through the card section by section, with the figures kept exactly as the company states them and the gaps marked clearly when the company does not say.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026. Pricing, country lists and features change, so double-check on Brighty’s own site before you commit to anything.

Verdict

Brighty sits at 5.6 out of 10 in my view. That is not a damning score, but it is not a recommendation either: it is the kind of card you would pick for a specific reason, knowing what you are giving up. The numbers below are my own weighing of the five criteria, and the reasons sit next to each one so you can judge them yourself.

The audience that makes the most of Brighty is an EEA resident who wants a crypto-funded IBAN and a virtual card in one app, and who is comfortable that the issuing partner is not named in the marketing. If you fall outside the EEA, or if a named, regulated bank behind the card matters to you, this is probably not your pick.

Will they give you the card

Brighty’s own card page is labelled “EEA only”, which means the European Economic Area, the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. The company has since opened the app to residents of two non-EEA countries, Montenegro and Andorra, while keeping a separate rule that the app will not onboard Russian nationals resident in those two countries. The exact wording is: “Due to regulatory restrictions, we are unable to onboard Russian nationals residing in Montenegro and Andorra.” So the rule is by residence, with a nationality carve-out that applies in those two places specifically.

The full country list is not on the public page. A third-party site, cryptocardhub, lists 36 countries, including the EU, EEA, Switzerland, Montenegro, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco and Moldova, but that is an unofficial count and you should treat it as a guide, not a confirmation. If your country is not on Brighty’s sign-up screen, the only way to know is to start the application and see what the system allows.

A practical note before you spend time on it: if you have a passport or ID from a sanctioned country, or if you live in a country Brighty does not serve, you will not get past the identity check. The page is upfront that “availability may vary by jurisdiction”, and the help center names offboarding reasons that include suspected fraud, unclear source of funds, partner-provider concerns, and PEP (politically exposed person) or sanctions status. In other words, the door is not always open just because your country is on the list.

How to get it

Brighty runs verification inside the app at sign-up, and the help center names Sumsub as the identity vendor. The company does not publish tiered KYC levels or processing times; the fallback if you get stuck is to email [email protected].

What you should have ready, based on the company’s published rules:

• A clear photo of your proof of identity, showing your full name, date of birth, place of birth and citizenship.
• A proof of address: a utility bill or bank statement in PDF, dated within the last three months. Screenshots are rejected, as are documents with blank fields including a blank signature line. A second official ID that shows your address is also accepted, as is an official registration confirmation.

Common rejection reasons Brighty lists are ambiguous, unclear, contradictory or incomplete documents, an address that does not match the one you typed at sign-up, and old or damaged paperwork. If you have moved recently, get a recent utility bill in your name first; that is the single most common snag.

Once verification is done, you choose a card in the app. The official card page shows a virtual card and references Visa wherever the card is accepted. The help center talks about a physical Visa, a virtual Visa (no PIN) and a virtual Mastercard. The card currency is not stated publicly. There is no published issuance timeline, no per-country delivery time, and no replacement price.

One unofficial but important point: cryptocardhub reports that physical Mastercard orders are currently not being fulfilled, with the help center saying they “will not be fulfilled” until further notice, and no cost or timeframe published. If you are planning to rely on a physical card, that is a real gap to be aware of.

Fees: what it really costs

Brighty does not publish a single fees page in the way some banks do, so the numbers have to be pieced together from the help center and the plans page. Here is what I found, kept to the figures the company itself states.

Subscription prices for Plus and Pro are not stated on the public page I read, but cryptocardhub lists Plus at EUR 9 a month and Pro at EUR 18 a month, with One free. Plan prices and the metal card are listed as not stated on the official pages I checked, so treat the third-party numbers as unofficial. There is also a contradiction worth flagging: cryptocardhub puts the card limits at EUR 15,000 / 25,000 / 50,000, while Brighty’s own help center article dated 15/09/2026 has them at EUR 50,000 / 75,000 / 100,000. The official numbers are the ones to trust until Brighty says otherwise.

A few everyday scenarios to make the table less abstract:

• Buying a EUR 30 lunch in a shop that prices in euros, on the free One plan. There is no FX fee (you are spending in the card’s home currency), and card spending is part of the free allowance, so the cost is the EUR 2.99 you already paid to issue the card, plus the network fee you paid to top up the balance.
• Buying the same lunch in a US-dollar-priced website while your balance is in euros. Brighty does not publish a card-level foreign-currency fee, so what you pay is the in-app conversion rate once you exceed the free monthly allowance: 0.6% on One, 0.5% on Plus, 0.4% on Pro. On One, the very first FX transaction of the month is the one that costs.
• Sending EUR 500 to a friend by SEPA on the free plan. You pay EUR 3 plus 0.3%, which is EUR 3 plus EUR 1.50, for a total of EUR 4.50. The minimum is EUR 10, so small transfers are penalised. On Plus or Pro, the same transfer is EUR 0.50 plus EUR 1.50, or EUR 2.00.

For ATM withdrawals, the official page claims the card is accepted at ATMs worldwide, but the fee and the allowance are not stated, and the help center adds the operational note that a physical Visa must be used at an ATM with a new PIN after a PIN change to activate. Cryptocardhub reports that the current Mastercard has no dependable ATM feature, and gives legacy Visa rates of EUR 3.50 in the EEA and EUR 3.50 plus 3.5% outside on Plus, EUR 3 in the EEA and EUR 3 plus 3% outside on Pro. Those are unofficial, but they are a useful warning that the ATM story is not fully formed.

Top up: how to fund the card

Brighty is built around two rails: a crypto balance held in the app and an IBAN fiat account. The NPC card page features a token (the company’s own), and names Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC among the assets you can hold inside the app. Incoming crypto is free on all three plans, with no monthly limit on the help center article I read.

For incoming fiat, the fees are:

• SEPA: 0.3%, minimum EUR 10.
• Faster Payments: 0.3%, minimum EUR 10.
• SWIFT: 0.7%, minimum EUR 50.
• Incoming fiat monthly limit: EUR 100,000.

For outgoing crypto, Brighty publishes a fixed per-network fee that is the same on all plans and has no monthly cap. The list I found is: ERC20 EUR 3, TRC20 EUR 3, BTC EUR 20, ADA EUR 1, XTZ EUR 1, HAQQ EUR 1, TON EUR 3, ARB EUR 3, Solana EUR 3, Polygon EUR 3, BEP20 EUR 3. The networks the company states for outgoing transfers are Ethereum, Tron, Bitcoin, Cardano, Tezos, Islamic Coin, TON, Arbitrum, Solana, Polygon and BEP20. The minimum top-up amount and the card top-up fee are not stated.

A practical thing to know before you send anything from an external wallet: the help center has articles on refunds for unsupported crypto deposits and on wrong-network transfers, which suggests these things happen often enough to deserve their own page. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit on the wrong network can be lost or take manual support work with no guarantee. If you are sending from an exchange, copy the network and address from inside the Brighty app and double-check them on a second screen before you confirm.

When you close the account yourself, Brighty says it is “scheduled for permanent deletion within 30 days”. What happens to any remaining balance during that window is not stated in the help article I read, so if you have a non-trivial balance, write to support first and ask.

Paying with it every day

Brighty’s card behaves like a prepaid card: you top up a balance, the balance is converted at the moment of payment, and the card cannot overdraw. For mobile wallets, the company says on its Montenegro/Andorra blog post that both Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported. The help center clarifies that, as of 26 May 2026, Apple Pay is not available on Mastercard cards for technical reasons but is available on Visa, while Google Pay works with the Mastercard. If mobile wallet support is the make-or-break for you, that distinction matters.

Blocked merchant categories are not stated, so I cannot tell you whether gambling, crypto purchases or other high-risk MCCs will go through. If you rely on the card for a specific type of spend, test it with a small amount first.

The reward side of the card is described on the NPC page as “Keep earning on your crypto while using it”, without a rate or a payout schedule, so there is no published cashback programme on the official pages I read. Cryptocardhub reports an unofficial structure: 0.5% base cashback in USDC on every tier, 1.25% to 1.75% on selected categories, monthly caps of 20, 60 and 100 USDC on One, Plus and Pro, paid the following month into a Reward Box. That is unofficial, and the same source notes cashback can be reversed if a purchase is later refunded or charged back, so I would not budget around it.

The app itself has limited public reviews: the Turkish App Store listing for “Brighty: Crypto Card & IBAN” sits at 4.9 from 9 ratings, and a Google Play rating was not found. That is a thin sample, and you should not read much into it either way.

For disputes, the help center has articles on refunds for unsupported crypto deposits and on wrong-network and unsupported cryptocurrency transfers, but I did not see a card-level dispute or chargeback article, and cryptocardhub says no dispute or chargeback process is described. That is consistent with the prepaid model: there is no bank to appeal to in the same way as with a debit card, and the rights you have depend on the underlying issuer and network, not on Brighty’s marketing.

What can go wrong

Brighty calls itself “a financial technology company, not a bank”, and that line does important work. The cards, accounts, custody and on- and off-ramps are run by “licensed partners” that Brighty does not name on the public pages I read. A third-party press release from September 2024, covered by StreetInsider, says Brighty is based in Switzerland and holds crypto-exchange and digital-asset custodian licences, but that is not confirmed on Brighty’s own pages. If the issuer’s identity and licence numbers matter to you, write to support and ask before you load a large balance.

On custody, Brighty is a custodial platform, meaning you do not hold your own private keys. The official FAQ says Brighty “keeps user funds in segregated accounts that are specially secured”, covering both fiat and crypto, and the company says it works with penetration testers. There is no mention of insurance, and two-factor authentication is not mentioned on the page I read. The standard card controls are there: freeze and terminate from inside the app, with freeze described as temporary and termination as irreversible.

User feedback is mixed. Trustpilot on the nl-be page sits at 3.2 out of 5 across 78 reviews, and three themes come up repeatedly:

• Accounts closed without explanation. The company response cites policy and regulation.
• Referral bonuses not paid. The company response cites suspected referral abuse.
• “Instant” transfers that take hours.

There is some praise for the cashback in those reviews. I did not find a card-specific complaint thread on Reddit, and the review dates were not visible on the page I read. A 3.2 out of 5 is a soft “people stay, but they grumble” score; it is not a red flag on its own, but it is not a quiet score either.

A few more risk notes worth keeping in mind:

• Support is email only at [email protected], with a help center at help.brighty.app. No phone, no live chat, no published hours. The help center is available in English, French, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish; Russian is not among them, and the support staff’s languages are not stated.
• The card depends on two licences at once: a payment-services or e-money licence for the card, and a MiCA CASP licence for the crypto side in the EU. The MiCA transitional period runs until 1 July 2026, after which providers must hold a MiCA authorisation. If Brighty or one of its partners falls out of compliance, the card can be wound down with notice.
• Programme closures in this category tend to follow a pattern: a notice period, then a stop on new loads, then a stop on spending, then a request to withdraw remaining balances. A single secondary source reported a 2026 closure with new loads ending 8 July 2026 and spending ending 8 August 2026, but that is one source and unconfirmed. The general point stands: do not park a balance you cannot afford to have frozen for a few weeks.
• The card is a virtual Mastercard (per the fees article) or a Visa, and a tokenised number in Apple Pay or Google Pay can be restricted by the issuer on a per-use basis. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds for several days, often up to seven.

What to take instead

If Brighty is not quite right, three other cards from the same broad category are worth a look. I have used the same 10-point scale.

A quick comparison on the points that come up most:

• US-issued and on the Visa network: International Visa Card pays in USD with a US-issued Platinum Visa (physical “coming soon”), deposits of any kind are free, USD spending is free, foreign currency is “Visa exchange rate + 2% FX fee”, and plans are Classic free, Pro $9.00 a month, Max $19.00 a month. That is a heavier FX fee than Brighty’s 0.4% to 0.6% on the higher plans, but the network is unambiguous and the country list is published, which Brighty does not match.
• Multicurrency and on Mastercard: UNi Card converts at “live OTC rates” with “no hidden exchange fees”, spends-to-earn rewards up to 3% with the card, and “no annual fee or foreign transaction fee”. The downside is the silence on the supported countries and the funding path, so this is a card for someone who can confirm availability before they commit.
• Stablecoin-backed and on Visa: Whop Cards spend from a Whop balance, with 5% cashback at selected merchants (Uber at the time of writing, more planned). Consumers are available in 31 US states, businesses in 41, and the unsupported-country list includes Belarus, China (mainland), Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. That is a sharp country cut, and the cashback payout currency and conditions are not stated.

If a crypto-funded IBAN is the main draw, Brighty is the most explicit of the three. If a named issuer and a published country list matter more, International Visa Card is the cleaner pick, at the cost of a 2% FX fee on non-USD spending.

Who I would recommend it to

Brighty is a good fit for a fairly specific reader: an adult resident of the EEA (or of Montenegro or Andorra, subject to the nationality carve-out) who holds crypto, wants a single app to convert it to a spendable balance, and would also use the IBAN for EUR transfers. The free incoming crypto and the wide network of outgoing chains make it useful for someone who moves funds between crypto and euros often. The cashback, if it lands as cryptocardhub describes, is a small bonus rather than a reason to choose the card.

It is not the right fit if any of the following applies to you:

• You live outside the EEA, Montenegro or Andorra, or you hold a passport from a country Brighty does not serve. The card is simply not available to you, and the unofficial 36-country list is not a reliable basis for planning.
• You need a physical card today. The unofficial report is that physical Mastercard orders are not being fulfilled, and the official page does not commit to a timeline.
• You want Apple Pay on a Mastercard. It is not available on the Mastercard as of 26 May 2026; only Visa supports it. Google Pay does work on the Mastercard.
• You need a named issuer. Brighty does not name its issuing partners on the public pages, and a 3.2-out-of-5 Trustpilot score, with “account closed without explanation” as a recurring theme, means the back end is something you have to take on trust.
• You need ATM access as a main feature. The card claims global ATM acceptance, but the fee and allowance are not published, and the unofficial picture is that the Mastercard’s ATM story is not dependable.
• You need a clear dispute and chargeback process. The help center does not describe one, and a prepaid, crypto-funded card generally offers fewer consumer protections than a regulated debit card.

If you do decide to try Brighty, a few habits help:

• Start with a small top-up from an external wallet on a network you have used before, and confirm the balance appears before sending a larger amount.
• Use the SEPA or SWIFT rails for fiat rather than card-to-card transfers, so the fees are predictable.
• Keep enough of your crypto in self-custody to avoid being fully exposed to a platform outage. The platform’s “segregated accounts” language is reassuring but not the same as insurance.
• Read the offboarding policy before you load a balance, and ask support by email what happens to a remaining balance on a user-initiated closure, since the help article does not say.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Brighty card?

The Brighty card is a virtual payment card (Mastercard or Visa) tied to a balance held in the Brighty app, where the balance can be topped up with crypto such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or USDC, or with euro transfers to the in-app IBAN. Brighty is a financial technology company, not a bank, and the cards, custody and transfers are run through licensed partners that are not named on the public pages.

Is Brighty a bank?

No. Brighty states that it is a financial technology company, not a bank, and that it works through licensed partners to provide accounts, cards, custody and the on- and off-ramp between crypto and fiat. As a result, customer funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme.

Who owns Brighty?

The public pages I read do not name the owners. A September 2024 press release on StreetInsider says Brighty is based in Switzerland and holds crypto-exchange and digital-asset custodian licences, but that is not confirmed on Brighty’s own pages and is unofficial until the company states it directly.

Is the Brighty card available in my country?

The official card page is labelled “EEA only”, and the app has been extended to Montenegro and Andorra, with a specific rule that Russian nationals resident in those two countries cannot be onboarded. A third-party site lists 36 supported countries, but the company has not published a definitive list, so the only reliable check is to start the sign-up and see what the app allows.

Does Brighty require KYC?

Yes. Verification runs in the app at sign-up, using Sumsub as the identity vendor, and you need a clear photo of an identity document showing your full name, date of birth, place of birth and citizenship, plus a proof of address such as a utility bill or bank statement in PDF, dated within the last three months. Screenshots are rejected, as are documents with blank fields.

How much does the Brighty card cost?

Issuing a virtual card costs EUR 2.99 on every plan, the monthly service fee is free, and balance inquiries are free. Currency conversion inside the app is free up to a monthly allowance (EUR 0 on One, EUR 2,000 on Plus, EUR 5,000 on Pro) and then 0.6%, 0.5% or 0.4% above the allowance, while SEPA out is EUR 3 plus 0.3% on One and EUR 0.5 plus 0.3% on Plus and Pro.

How do I top up the Brighty card?

You can send crypto from an external wallet, free of charge on every plan, or transfer euros by SEPA, Faster Payments or SWIFT, with fees of 0.3% (min EUR 10), 0.3% (min EUR 10) and 0.7% (min EUR 50) respectively and a monthly fiat limit of EUR 100,000. The minimum top-up amount and the card top-up fee are not stated publicly.

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

It depends on the network. As of 26 May 2026, Apple Pay is unavailable for Mastercard cards and available for Visa, while Google Pay works with the Mastercard. If mobile wallet support is critical, the Visa variant is the safer choice until Brighty says otherwise.

Is the Brighty card safe?

Brighty is a custodial platform, meaning the company holds the keys to your crypto, and the official FAQ says user funds are kept in segregated accounts that are specially secured. The company names penetration testing, but does not mention insurance or two-factor authentication on the public pages, and the Trustpilot score is 3.2 out of 5 across 78 reviews, with the loudest complaints about unexplained account closures.

How do I close my Brighty account?

You can request closure from inside the app, and Brighty says the account is “scheduled for permanent deletion within 30 days”. The help article does not say what happens to a remaining balance during that window, so write to [email protected] in advance if you hold a non-zero balance and want to know how it will be returned.

Content created by the «cryptocardcatalog» team