SharPay in plain English: who it is for, what it costs, and what to watch out for

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

SharPay is one of the smaller names in the crypto-card market, and the first thing that stands out about it is what it is not. It is not a flashy cashback product, not pitched at traders, and not advertised in a thousand places. The offering is narrower: a euro Mastercard debit card issued under a Lithuanian e-money licence, a wallet app that holds euros and a handful of crypto assets, and a sign-up that, on paper, is open to people outside the European Union. That narrow focus is also why I looked at it carefully. Cards that promise a euro account to non-EU residents are worth checking line by line, because the small print usually decides whether they are useful or just interesting.

I went through SharPay’s public pages and the supporting documents, and the picture that comes through is a mixed one. The card works. The licensing is in order. The fees, though, are not low, and the everyday experience is shaped as much by what the provider does not publish as by what it does. In this review I will walk through who SharPay is for, what it costs to use, how the top-up and spending flow work in practice, and where the rough edges sit. I will also compare it to three alternatives that cover similar ground, so that by the end you can decide whether it belongs on your shortlist or whether one of the other names suits you better.

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

Verdict

SharPay earns a 5.9 out of 10 in this review. That is a middling score, and the middling is honest rather than dismissive: the product is real, the licences behind it are real, and for a particular kind of reader it does a competent job. The reasons it is not higher are also clear from the fact sheet. The cost of running the card sits at the higher end of the category, the FX mark-up is steep, and the provider leaves several practical questions unanswered on its public pages. The reliability and everyday use of the card, on the other hand, are noticeably stronger than its cost profile, which is why the total does not slide further down.

The reader SharPay is built for is the non-EU resident who needs a euro Mastercard with Apple Pay, is comfortable with a custodial wallet, and is not looking for cashback or staking yield. If that is you, SharPay will do the job and the licence chain means your funds are at least held by a regulated e-money institution rather than an unknown operator. If you are an EU resident, the crypto services are explicitly not for you, and the payment-account side of the offer is also unlikely to be the cheapest way to get a euro card.

Score breakdown

If you are an EU resident looking for a euro card, SharPay is not the right address. If you are outside the EU, want a Mastercard that works with Apple Pay, and you understand the fees in advance, SharPay is a defensible option among a small field.

Who will they give you the card

The first question for any reader is whether SharPay will actually let you in, and the answer depends on where you live, not on your passport. SharPay’s own rule is stated in plain terms: you must not be a resident of a restricted or prohibited country. The full prohibited list sits in SPEKA Payments Corp’s policy documents and includes Russia, Belarus, Crimea, the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Iran, Cuba and Syria, among others. The way the rule is phrased means a resident of a country on the prohibited list is treated on the basis of where they live, not on the basis of their passport, but in practice the sanctions list narrows what SharPay can do for several nationalities.

The crypto side of the offering is closed to EU residents. SharPay states that crypto services are provided outside the EU and not to EU residents, which is consistent with how the underlying payment-services and crypto licences are set up. If you live in an EU member state, the euro payment account may still be relevant, but the card spends a balance that you will have to fund by other means, and the crypto part of the product is not for you.

Citizenship is treated separately. If you are not an EU citizen, SharPay asks you to verify with a foreign passport. EU citizens can use a passport or a national ID card. There is no separate citizenship rule that I could find in the public pages, but residence and sanctions screening are the practical gates, and they are the ones that decide whether you can proceed at all.

It is also worth saying that SharPay does not publish a list of supported countries. The fact that the company runs a website in English, Ukrainian and German, mentions delivery in “about 15 working days” and operates a Cyprus-registered parent company is suggestive but not a guarantee. If you are considering the card, treat the absence of an explicit list as a sign that the answer will depend on the documents you can produce, and check the prohibited list before you spend time on the application.

How to get it

Sign-up is a standard three-step flow: register, verify, order the card. Registration asks for a phone number, an email address and a password, after which the app puts you through two verification levels. Level 1 covers identity. SharPay asks for a full-page passport scan of good quality — cropped copies are rejected — and bank statements in English. The questionnaire covers expected turnover, the source of your funds, and whether you have any links to politically exposed persons or to US persons. A short video selfie rounds out the Level 1 check, and document review runs from one to seventy-two hours.

Level 2 is required for fiat accounts and cards, so this is the level you will reach for the euro Mastercard. It is an extra check that can take up to five days. The same identity documents are reused where possible. SharPay warns that poor lighting, hats, glasses or filters in the video selfie, or any cropped copy of a document, will trigger rejection.

Once verification is complete, the card is ordered from inside the app. There are two forms: a virtual card that becomes active immediately after ordering, and a physical card that takes about fifteen working days to arrive. SharPay’s homepage and app store listing say you can hold up to five cards per account. The card is a Mastercard debit card; the fee schedule is in euros, and SharPay’s description is that the card is “issued by UAB Walletto” — UAB Walletto being the Lithuanian e-money institution behind it. I could not find an age requirement on the public pages, which is unusual; if you are under 18 and reading this, raise the question with support before you start the application.

What it really costs

Cost is the part of the picture that does the most work against SharPay, and it is the section where you should pay closest attention. The headline fees are published in a clean schedule, but the cumulative effect of opening an account, holding a card, topping it up and spending in another currency pushes the total noticeably higher than the cheapest cards in this corner of the market.

SharPay fee and limit schedule

To translate that schedule into something a person actually feels, run three everyday payments through it.

You are sitting in a café in Berlin, you have a euro balance on your card, and you pay 4 EUR for a coffee. The card spend itself is shown as “-” in SharPay’s published fees, so the coffee costs 4 EUR, with no further fee. The 3 EUR monthly service fee is what hurts on a quiet month: even if you make a single 4 EUR payment, you have spent 7 EUR in real terms.

You travel to Thailand, and the same 4 EUR of coffee goes through the card. The FX mark-up on the personal card is 2.99% on top of the network rate. The mark-up is applied to the network rate at the moment of authorisation, and it is a flat percentage — there is no “free foreign currency” tier as you sometimes see on the more expensive travel cards.

You fund the card with USDC loaded through Mastercard or VISA instead of through a regular crypto transfer. The published rate is 4% on deposit and 3% on withdrawal. That is materially more expensive than moving USDC on a public network, and it is the route to take only when the network path is not available. If you can route USDC through a normal chain, the fee is described only as a “network fee” — which is the blockchain’s gas, not SharPay’s charge.

ATM withdrawals are possible, but SharPay’s fee page does not list an ATM fee or an allowance. Treat the absence as a question to ask support before you rely on the card for cash, and assume there will be some cost on top of any fee your own bank charges.

Finally, there is a single-tier pricing structure: SharPay does not publish “classic”, “pro” or “metal” plans. The cost of the card is the same for everyone, and the differences are in the products you choose to add, not in a subscription level you can subscribe to.

Top up

The way you fund the card is one of the more interesting parts of the offering, and also one of the more confusing, because SharPay lists the supported assets clearly but stops short of naming the networks.

The supported currencies, as they appear on the price and top-up pages, are EUR, USDT, USDC, BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC and BCH, with DAI and TUSD also mentioned on the price page. That is a broader set than the average euro card, and it covers the cases most readers will actually want — euro from a regular bank, plus the major stablecoins and a handful of mainstream coins. The gap is in the next layer. The FAQ tells the user to “select the currency and network” inside the app, but the network list itself is not published on the FAQ page. In practice, that means the choice of network is something you confirm in the app at the moment of funding, and the responsibility for sending on the right chain is yours. If you have used a stablecoin card before, you will recognise the pattern: send USDT on Ethereum when the app asked for Polygon, and the funds are not just delayed, they are typically unrecoverable.

Two technical notes that are easy to miss. XRP and assets on networks that use a memo or destination tag need that tag attached to the transfer; the top-up flow tells you when one is required, and the FAQ flags it. The minimum top-up amount is also not listed on the page — SharPay says the minimum is shown in the top-up amount input field inside the app, which is a fair design choice, but it means you have to log in to find out the floor.

There are three practical routes for a top-up. You can move euros in by card-to-card transfer from another card you hold, which costs 2.00 EUR + 1.99% and is the simplest if you already have a euro balance somewhere. You can move crypto from your own wallet, paying only the network’s gas fee and accepting the system exchange rate at the moment the funds land. Or you can fund with USDC through Mastercard or VISA, which is the most expensive at 4% on deposit, and is a fallback rather than a default.

When you spend the balance in a currency other than the one you loaded, SharPay says the funds are “automatically exchanged at the system exchange rate”. The spread on that exchange, on top of the 2.99% FX mark-up, is not stated on the fee page. It is the kind of number that varies with the time of day and the liquidity SharPay has on hand, and the honest framing is that the 2.99% mark-up is the floor of what you pay, not the ceiling.

Paying with it every day

The everyday experience of SharPay is the strongest part of the product, and the area where the score is the most generous. Once the card is in hand, the day-to-day flow is short: tap, authorise, walk away.

The virtual card arrives in the app as soon as you order it, which means you can use it for online purchases within minutes of finishing verification. The physical card follows in about fifteen working days, and the company warns that delivery times vary by destination. The replacement fee for a virtual card is 1.00 EUR; the cost of a physical replacement is not stated. Both cards are Mastercard debit cards, denominated in euros, and the app supports Google Pay and Apple Pay. Tokenising the card into the phone wallet is the path most readers will take, and the dynamic security codes that Apple Pay and Google Pay generate for each transaction are a meaningful upgrade over the physical card.

In a shop, you can pay contactless. Online, you pay with the card number and expiry stored in your browser, with 3-D Secure 2.0 added on top. 3-D Secure is the protocol that asks for a one-time code or a biometric confirmation when the issuer thinks a transaction looks risky, and the merchant’s experience is usually a small pop-up that you may or may not see depending on the amount and the merchant’s settings.

Spending categories the card will not let you touch follow the prohibited-activities list from SPEKA Payments Corp. That list covers illegal gambling services — including unregulated online casinos and sports betting — as well as adult content and other restricted lines of business. Legitimate gambling and betting operators in regulated markets are typically allowed, but the card can be declined at a shop whose merchant code falls into the blocked categories, and that is an issuer policy rather than a regulator’s.

Cash is the more interesting question. SharPay says ATM withdrawals are possible, but the fee and the allowance are not on the public fee page, which makes the cash leg of the card harder to budget than the contactless leg. If you expect to take out cash, ask support for the current rate before you travel, and plan a fallback in case the network is poor or the limit is tight.

Rewards and cashback are the part of the everyday story that is shortest. SharPay’s pages do not mention a cashback programme, so the effective yield on spending is zero. If the comparison you are making is to a card that returns 1% or 2%, that gap is one of the things you are paying for in the 3 EUR monthly service fee and the 2.99% FX mark-up — and the answer, fairly, is that SharPay is not trying to be that card.

The app is the centre of the experience. The SharPay Wallet app is on Google Play and the Apple App Store, and the homepage claims 15,000+ users. I did not see app store ratings or the number of ratings on the public pages, and that is information you can check on your phone’s store page before you download. Inside the app you can block and unblock cards, see transactions in real time, set spending limits where the programme allows, and reach support through the in-app widget.

Disputes follow the standard chargeback route. SharPay publishes a refund policy, the fee for handling a chargeback is 40 EUR, and the FAQ points to the policy PDF for the time frames. If a payment is taken twice, the FAQ says the duplicate is returned automatically. Two practical points to keep in mind: the 40 EUR chargeback fee is owed regardless of whether the dispute is decided in your favour, and the time frames in the PDF govern how long you have to raise the dispute, so read the policy before you need it.

What can go wrong

The risk profile of a card like SharPay is shaped by three layers: the company behind it, the technology that holds your funds, and the rules that decide when the card works and when it does not. Going through each in turn makes the picture easier to read.

The corporate layer is the part I can speak to most concretely. SharPay’s website and app are designed and operated by GTM Exchange Ltd, a company registered in Cyprus. The card itself is issued by UAB Walletto, a Lithuanian electronic money institution licensed by the Bank of Lithuania under licence number 33. The payment services that sit behind the card are provided by SPEKA Payments Corp., a Canadian money services business registered with FINTRAC under MSB number M22046940. That is a recognisable pattern in this corner of the market: a brand and front-end in one jurisdiction, the card programme in another, the payment services in a third. The licence chain is published, the entities are real, and the structure is similar to what other regulated crypto cards use.

The technology layer is the part the user has to take on trust. SharPay is a custodial product: the euros and the crypto sit with the provider, not in your own wallet, and the credentials that move them are held by the company rather than by you. The safeguards the company describes are the standard ones: one-time codes and 2FA at login, the ability to block and unblock cards in the app, 3-D Secure 2.0 for online payments, and the option for the company to ask for “proof of funds” if a transaction looks out of pattern. The pages I read do not describe fund segregation in detail, and they do not mention insurance. Under EU rules, an electronic money institution has to safeguard customer funds, but the level of detail on that safeguarding is not on the public pages, and that is one of the questions to raise with support if it matters to you.

The complaints picture is the unusual part, and unusually clean. I looked for SharPay card complaints on Reddit and Trustpilot and could not find a dedicated page for the brand — a Trustpilot search in October 2026 returned other names such as Shieldpay and b-sharpe rather than SharPay, and the Reddit search returned unrelated brands such as Shop Pay and OnePay. That is not proof of perfection, and it is partly a function of the company’s size, but it does mean there is no public pattern of complaints to weigh against the offering.

There are also risks that come from how cards in this category behave in the wild. Online merchants can decline a card based on the BIN — the first six or eight digits that identify the issuer — and a card issued in Lithuania can look “foreign” to a US shop, especially where Address Verification Service is in use. AVS compares the numeric parts of a billing address with the issuer’s records, and it is mostly a US, Canada and UK tool. Foreign-issued cards frequently fall back to manual review, which is a friction you should expect rather than be surprised by. Declined authorisations can also leave a temporary hold on funds for several days, which is an irritation rather than a cost.

The corporate event that has closed other programmes in this category is also worth naming, because the industry has a track record. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer in the weeks that followed. In 2018, Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe, which closed all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes overnight. Neither of those events involved SharPay, but the pattern is real: a card programme can be wound down by a network decision rather than by anything the cardholder did, and the wind-down is usually a notice period, then no new loads, then a deadline to withdraw the balance. I did not find any dated events of that kind for SharPay, and the company does not publish a “what happens if the programme closes” note on the pages I read.

Support is the last practical risk to weigh. SharPay publishes a phone number in Cyprus (+357 2503-09-49), an email contact (the address is rendered as an image on the page rather than as plain text, which is a small obstacle to scraping but not to calling), an in-app support widget, and a presence on Facebook, X, Instagram and LinkedIn. The website is available in English, Ukrainian and German. The company does not publish support hours. If you depend on the card, that is information to confirm in advance, especially if you are in a time zone far from Cyprus.

What to take instead

SharPay is one of a small number of euro cards aimed at non-EU residents, and the alternatives I would weigh against it are three: International Visa Card, UNi Card and Whop Cards. Each addresses a slightly different problem, and the differences are easier to see side by side than in prose.

International Visa Card is the closest in spirit to SharPay, with a US-dollar denomination, a $5 issuance fee and no maintenance charge on the cheapest plan. The card is virtual, ships in USD and supports USDC and USDT funding at 1:1. The geographic rules are tighter than SharPay’s: residents of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam cannot hold the card, and FATF grey-list applications are reviewed case by case. The card uses the Visa exchange rate plus a 2% FX fee, which is lower than SharPay’s 2.99% mark-up on the personal card. If you spend mainly in dollars and your country is on the supported side of the list, this card is usually a better answer than SharPay for everyday use.

UNi Card takes a different angle. It is a multicurrency Mastercard on the UNi.Global account, with no annual fee and no foreign transaction fee stated on the pages I read, and assets converted at live OTC rates. The card earns a Spend-to-Earn reward of up to 3%, which is the highest in this comparison and the main reason to look at it. The pages do not state funding options, KYC rules or the residence list, so UNi Card is the option to shortlist on the strength of the fee and the reward, and to check the small print on before you commit.

Whop Cards is a Visa card aimed at US consumers (31 states) and US businesses (41 states), with a list of unsupported countries that is broader than SharPay’s and includes Belarus, mainland China, Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. The page says “no extra fees”, but it does not list conversion or FX fees in the materials I read, which is the same gap SharPay has on a few line items. The card earns 5% cashback at select merchants, currently Uber, with more planned. If you are a US-based creator or small business, Whop Cards is the more focused product; if you are outside the US, it is unlikely to be available to you.

The short version of the comparison is straightforward. SharPay is the right card for a non-EU resident who specifically needs a euro Mastercard with Apple Pay and is comfortable paying a premium for it. International Visa Card is the right card for a US-dollar spender who wants lower ongoing costs. UNi Card is the right card if multicurrency and cashback are your priorities and the small print works for your situation. Whop Cards is the right card for a US consumer or business that wants a Whop-balance card with cashback at named merchants.

Who I would recommend it to

Pulling the threads together, the reader I would point to SharPay is a non-EU resident with a foreign passport, a need for a euro Mastercard, and a willingness to accept a 3 EUR monthly fee and a 2.99% FX mark-up in exchange for Apple Pay, a custodial euro account, and a card from a licensed issuer. The KYC flow is standard, the documents required are clear, and the verification timeline is published. The card is real, the licence chain is published, and the company has not been the subject of public complaint threads in the searches I ran.

The reader I would steer away from SharPay is the EU resident, the dollar spender who can use International Visa Card instead, the multicurrency traveller who would be better served by UNi Card, and the US consumer who can use Whop Cards. I would also pause before recommending SharPay to anyone whose monthly spend is too low to make the 3 EUR service fee feel reasonable, or who needs a published cash withdrawal allowance, an explicit support window, or a specific network for a stablecoin top-up.

A final word on what to check before you sign up. Read the prohibited-country list in SPEKA Payments Corp’s policy, and confirm your country of residence is not on it. Read the fee schedule and total the costs of your most common transactions, not just the headline. Open the app and find the minimum top-up and the network list before you move any funds. If you plan to use Apple Pay or Google Pay, confirm in the support widget that the tokenisation is enabled in your country. And keep the customer support phone number somewhere you can find it, because the part of any card you discover last is the part you wish you had checked first.

Frequently asked questions

What is SharPay card?

SharPay is a euro Mastercard debit card linked to a SharPay Wallet app, issued by UAB Walletto under a Bank of Lithuania e-money licence. The app holds a euro balance and supports a small set of crypto assets, and the card spends from the euro balance. The product is built around a euro account plus a card, with crypto as a funding rail.

Is SharPay a bank?

No. SharPay is operated by GTM Exchange Ltd in Cyprus, the card is issued by UAB Walletto (a Lithuanian e-money institution), and the payment services are provided by SPEKA Payments Corp. in Canada. It is a regulated e-money and payments product, not a bank, and customer funds are not the same as bank deposits.

Who owns SharPay?

The website and app are operated by GTM Exchange Ltd, registered in Cyprus. The card is issued by UAB Walletto in Lithuania. The payment services sit with SPEKA Payments Corp. in Canada. The public pages do not identify individual owners, and the corporate ownership is not stated beyond the operating companies.

Is SharPay card available in my country?

SharPay does not publish a list of supported countries. The rule is residence-based: you must not live in a restricted or prohibited country, and the prohibited list includes Russia, Belarus, Crimea, the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Iran, Cuba and Syria. Crypto services are not for EU residents. The cleanest way to find out is to start the registration and see whether your documents are accepted.

How do I apply for the SharPay card?

Register in the app with a phone number, an email and a password, complete Level 1 identity verification with a passport, bank statements and a video selfie, then complete Level 2 (the additional check for fiat accounts and cards), and order the card. Level 2 can take up to five days. The virtual card is active immediately after ordering.

Does SharPay require KYC?

Yes. Level 1 requires a full-page passport scan, bank statements in English, a turnover and source-of-funds questionnaire, and a video selfie. Level 2 adds an extra check that can take up to five days. Cropped document copies, poor lighting, hats, glasses or filters in the video selfie will trigger rejection.

How do I top up my SharPay card?

You can fund the card by card-to-card transfer from another card (2.00 EUR + 1.99%), by sending crypto from your own wallet (network fee only), or, in the case of USDC, by Mastercard or VISA (4% on deposit). The app shows the minimum top-up inside the top-up input field. For XRP and assets that use a memo, the top-up flow tells you when a tag is required.

How do I add the SharPay card to Apple Wallet?

Open the SharPay Wallet app, choose the card, and follow the in-app prompt to add it to Apple Wallet. The same path works for Google Pay. Tokenisation is supported on both, and the dynamic security codes that the wallet generates are used for each transaction rather than the card number.

Where can I use the SharPay card?

Anywhere Mastercard is accepted, in shops and online. Contactless, mobile wallet and online payments are all supported. The card does not work at merchants in the blocked categories, which include illegal gambling and adult content, and may be declined by some online merchants whose checks treat a foreign-issued BIN as higher risk.

Is SharPay card safe?

SharPay is a custodial product, which means the provider holds the funds rather than you. The published safeguards are 2FA, in-app card blocking, 3-D Secure 2.0 and the option for the company to ask for proof of funds. The licence chain is published, the issuer is regulated in Lithuania, and I did not find public complaint threads for the brand. As with any custodial product, the practical answer is that it is as safe as the provider and the regulator behind it.

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