A crypto debit card that leans on Kraken's infrastructure, with a free plastic and a metal tier

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Krak is the consumer brand of Kraken, the long-running crypto exchange, and the Krak card is its debit card. It is a Mastercard that spends the balance in your Krak Everyday account, and Kraken pitches it as a low-fee way to pay from crypto or cash. This review walks through what the card actually costs, who can get one, how the top-up works, and where it falls short. By the end you should know whether it fits your situation or whether a different card is a better match.

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

Verdict

Krak scores 7.1 out of 10 in my assessment. That is a solid mid-table result, not a top score, and the breakdown below shows why. The everyday-use side of the card is excellent: virtual card in minutes, free plastic in the post, a metal tier for larger balances, no monthly fee, and acceptance anywhere Mastercard is taken. The cost picture is similarly strong on paper. The weaker areas are eligibility (a narrow UK and EU footprint) and reliability, where the public record shows complaint patterns that are worth taking seriously.

The card suits UK and EU residents who already hold assets on Kraken or Krak and want to spend them without a chain of fees, or who are after a simple crypto cashback card. It does not suit readers outside the UK and EU, anyone who needs a card that works across a wider range of countries right now, or anyone uncomfortable with a custodial setup during crypto market stress.

Will they give you the card

The card is currently available to residents of the UK and the EU, with the card page saying “more countries coming soon.” A Krak help article uses slightly different language and says personal accounts are open to UK, EEA and US residents. The two statements do not match: the card landing page talks about UK and EU availability, while a help-centre article extends the account to the EEA and the US. I would treat the card-page wording as the authoritative scope for the card itself, and flag the broader help-centre wording because it is part of the public record.

Eligibility is residence-based rather than citizenship-based, which matters if you are a citizen of one country living in another. There is also a footnote on the card page saying that geographic restrictions apply, which in practice means the issuer can decline applicants from supported regions if local rules require it.

A few other conditions apply that are not stated in detail on the card pages. The applicant must be at least 18 and must have a verified Krak account with completed KYC. The cards are issued by Monavate, a UK electronic money institution (FCA reference number 901097), and in the EEA by Monavate UAB, authorised in Lithuania under licence number 92. Krak is the consumer app of Kraken, and the relationship you enter is with the issuer rather than with Krak or Kraken directly.

The single biggest practical limitation is the country list. If you are not a resident of the UK or an EU member state, you cannot get the card today. If you are, the rest of the process is straightforward, but I would not assume the country list will expand on any particular timeline.

How to get it

The signup path has three steps: open and verify a Krak account, complete KYC, and then order a card from inside the app. The virtual card is available within minutes of approval, and a physical card is shipped free of charge. Two physical colours are available, orange or black.

The metal card is a separate tier. It is stainless steel, weighs 16 grams, and is not free. To order one you need to hold an average of GBP 50,000 (or EUR 50,000) in combined assets across Krak, Kraken and Kraken Pro. The card page does not say how the average is calculated (daily, monthly, trailing), so this is worth confirming with support if you are close to the threshold and planning around it.

A few things the card page does not spell out:

• The specific identity documents you need to provide for KYC are not listed on the pages I read. In practice, EU and UK KYC usually means a government photo ID plus a proof of address, but you should expect to provide whatever the verification flow in the app asks for.
• Delivery times for the physical card are not stated. A third-party source (CryptoCardHub, 11 August 2026) says plastic cards normally arrive within 14 business days; that figure is unofficial and not confirmed by Krak. The metal card is not available in every delivery country, and the help page lists UK and EEA delivery only.
• Replacement of a physical card costs $4.99, charged by Monavate in the equivalent of the card currency.
• You can hold up to two virtual and two physical active cards at a time, according to the same unofficial third-party source. Virtual card creation is reportedly capped at three per rolling 30 days. None of these limits are confirmed by Krak’s own pages.

One practical detail worth knowing: virtual and physical cards are cancelled separately. If you lose your phone and want to close the virtual card, the physical one keeps working until you cancel it as well.

What the card really costs: Fees

This is one of the card’s strongest points on paper. The card page states that the card is “free to order” and that there are “no monthly or annual fees.” It also says there are “zero transaction fees, FX fees, ATM withdrawal fees or monthly fees on your spend.” That last sentence is the most important, because most cards that call themselves free in the headline still charge something when you actually use them. Krak’s claim is that you do not pay Krak anything to spend or withdraw.

What you do pay is a “variable spread” when you spend across assets. That spread is the difference between the market price of the asset you are selling and the rate Krak applies when it converts to the card currency. The size of that spread is not stated on the card pages I read, and the spread is the only meaningful variable cost of using the card. Whether it is cheap or expensive depends on Krak’s pricing, not on a published fee schedule.

The replacement fee is the only fixed cost you are likely to encounter: $4.99 (charged in the card currency equivalent) for a physical replacement.

Two everyday examples show how this plays out:

• A coffee in euros paid from a euro balance. No conversion happens, there is no FX fee, and there is no Krak transaction fee. You pay exactly the euro price on the receipt.
• A coffee in euros paid from a Bitcoin balance. Krak converts BTC to euros at the point of sale. The Mastercard rate applies to any non-euro side, but you also pick up the variable spread on the BTC-to-euro conversion, which is where the real cost lives. The size of that spread is not disclosed.

Hotel and car-rental payments can hold an additional 10–20% on top of the bill, and the unused portion can take up to seven days to clear. This is industry behaviour rather than a Krak-specific fee, but it is worth knowing about if you are budgeting for a trip.

How to top it up: Top up options

The card does not have a separate “top up” button in the sense that a prepaid card does. It spends directly from your Krak Everyday account balance, and you fund that balance the way you fund any other Krak account: by depositing from a bank, transferring crypto, or moving funds from another Krak product.

The mechanics that matter for everyday use are:

• You set a spend order in the app. If your Everyday account holds several currencies or assets, you choose which one is spent first, which is spent second, and so on. This matters because it controls when, and on what, the variable spread is applied.
• The Everyday account is offered as supporting over 600 assets. Not all of those are available for card spending: unsupported assets show as “Unavailable” in the spend-order screen.
• Fiat balances (GBP for UK cards, EUR for EEA cards) can be spent directly, with no spread.
• Some deposit methods carry a 3-day hold before withdrawals are allowed. This is a Kraken-wide policy rather than a card-specific one, but it affects how quickly you can move money in and back out.
• A third-party source reports near-instant card deposits of GBP/EUR 0.25 plus 3.75% via a specific deposit method (CryptoCardHub, 11 August 2026). I could not confirm this on the official pages, and a percentage-based deposit fee is not what you would expect on a fee-free card, so I would check the actual fee in the deposit screen before relying on it.

One thing the card pages do not list is the set of blockchain networks supported for crypto deposits. That is a real gap if you intend to fund the card with stablecoins, because sending a token on the wrong network is a common way to lose money, and there is no support recovery guaranteed. I would not transfer crypto into the card before checking the network in the deposit screen.

Withdrawal of card balance back to a bank account or to crypto is not described in the card FAQ, and there is a clause saying a fee may apply if you end the agreement within six months. Closing the underlying Kraken E-Wallet also terminates the Monavate card agreement, which is a useful detail to know if you are tidying up accounts.

Paying with it every day

The everyday experience is the card’s strongest area. The virtual card is available within minutes, the physical card is free, and the metal tier exists for higher balances. The card runs on Mastercard, so it works at any merchant that accepts Mastercard, online and offline. Apple Pay is supported; Google Pay is mentioned in a third-party source but not in the official wallet support list on the pages I read, so I would treat Google Pay availability as worth confirming in the app.

ATM withdrawals work in over 190 countries. Krak does not charge an ATM fee, although the third-party ATM operator may. A free allowance is not stated, so I would assume that the operator’s fee is the only fee, and that Krak passes the withdrawal through at cost.

Cashback is the carrot. Krak offers “up to 2% cashback in cash or crypto,” and the rate depends on your average asset balance across Krak, Kraken and Kraken Pro. Travel booked through Krak Concierge can earn up to 4%. Cashback is paid in cash or crypto at your choice, and the rate moves up the more assets you hold, which is the same model many cashback cards use to reward sticky customers.

The app is available on iOS and Android, and in-app support is advertised as 24/7. App store ratings are not quoted on the official pages. The languages, email and phone options for support are not listed on the pages I read.

If something goes wrong with a transaction, the procedure is to open the transaction in the app and tap “Get help with this transaction.” Refunds return to the Everyday account in the card’s primary currency; if you paid from a crypto balance, the refund does not automatically reconvert back to that crypto. The complaint timeline is laid out for the UK and EEA: 24-hour acknowledgement and a final response within 15 business days in the UK (extendable by 20), and 15 business days in the EEA (35 if delayed). A Kraken help article elsewhere gives a 45–60 day window for dispute resolution, which is longer than the card’s published timeline, and the difference is not reconciled in the public materials.

A few practical things to know about card payments in general that apply here:

• Contactless thresholds before a PIN is required are reported by a third-party source as GBP 300 in the UK and a cumulative EUR 150 in the EEA. These are unofficial figures and not confirmed by Krak.
• The card can be frozen, unfrozen or replaced instantly from the app, which is the main day-to-day safety lever you have.
• You can block specific currencies from being spent through the Spend Order, which is a useful control if you do not want, say, a volatile asset being drawn on by mistake.

What can go wrong

Crypto cards in general carry a few well-known risks, and Krak has its own. The most important ones to think about are:

• Custodial risk. The Everyday account is an e-money account issued by Kraken, and crypto held on Krak is custodial. If the platform has a security incident or solvency problem, your funds are at risk alongside everyone else’s. Card funds are not covered by the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and the EEA wallet has no deposit-guarantee coverage according to a third-party source. A third-party source also reports that fiat is held in segregated accounts at regulated institutions; that detail is not in the card terms.
• Geographic and account freezes. A consistent theme in user reports is accounts restricted after a deposit or a bank transfer, with the funds inaccessible. This is consistent with KYC/AML-driven reviews, but the reported experience is that the response is slow and the escalation path is unclear. There is also a third-party report of an 11-day security review in July 2026 that suspended deposits, withdrawals and card use; Kraken support later said it “dropped the ball” on the communication, per the same source.
• Regulator action on the issuer. A third-party aggregator (penchan.co, undated and unverified) reports a Bank of Lithuania fine or warning on Monavate UAB in connection with AML and safeguarding. I have not been able to confirm this on the regulator’s public register from the pages I read, and I would not treat a single third-party claim as a fact, but it is in the public record and worth being aware of.
• Operational incidents. Third-party sources report that card payments have occasionally failed in the UK and EEA. I have not seen a Krak statement on those incidents, and they are not large in the grand scheme of card programmes, but they are reminders that any card can have an outage.
• The conversion spread. Because the size of the spread on crypto-to-fiat conversion is not published, you are trusting Krak’s pricing. If you spend in a currency or asset that trades on a thin market, the spread is the only cost that matters, and you will not see it itemised on the receipt.
• Hotel and car-rental holds. A 10–20% hold on top of the bill, taking up to seven days to release, can surprise cardholders who are budgeting tightly. The hold is industry-wide rather than Krak-specific.
• Complaint record. Trustpilot ratings for krak.app are inconsistent across sources: 3.8 from 34 reviews in one snapshot, 1.9 from 126 in another. The themes in the lower-rated set are account restrictions, slow replies, and refund delays. A small number of cardholders have also reported terminals asking for a signature rather than a PIN, and a delayed refund after that.

These risks are common to many custodial crypto cards. The single best mitigation is the same as for any custodial crypto product: do not keep more on the platform than you can afford to have temporarily inaccessible.

What to take instead

Krak is not the only option, and the right alternative depends on what you actually need. The three below are the most directly comparable from the public material available.

• Coinbase Card is a Visa debit card available across the US (except Hawaii). It converts crypto to US dollars at the point of sale, and the headline cost is zero spending fees and no annual fees, with a spread applied on conversion. Optional crypto rewards are available on every purchase, but only for US cardholders. If you are in the US and want a similar “spend from a crypto balance” experience, this is the most direct alternative. The downside is that the card is US-only.
• OKX launched a Mastercard in the EU plus Norway on 28 January 2026, with Iceland and Liechtenstein excluded. It runs through OKX Pay, is euro-denominated, and the launch materials say there is no card fee, no transaction fee, and no FX fee. The conversion spread is quoted as 0.1% in an explainer (May 2026) and 0.4% in the launch press release, with the explainer being the newer figure. Cashback is paid in USDG and only on USDG-funded purchases, with monthly caps that vary by VIP tier. The big gap is that no physical card is mentioned, so it is best thought of as a virtual-card option for now.
• Young Card is the weaker alternative on the public record. Cashback is paid in YNG tokens, and the rate varies by Club tier, but eligibility, fees, and even which tiers pay what are not stated on the pages I read. Worth watching rather than choosing today.

If you are outside the UK and EU, Coinbase Card is the only one of these that might actually be available to you, and then only if you are a US resident. If you are in the EU and want a card that does not rely on a variable spread you cannot see, OKX is the cleaner option on conversion cost, at the expense of a physical card. Krak’s case rests on its broader asset list, its no-monthly-fee structure, and the option of a metal card for larger balances.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Krak card to a UK or EU resident who:

• Already has a Krak or Kraken account, and wants to spend from that balance without paying a chain of fees.
• Holds enough assets to qualify for the higher cashback tier or for the metal card, and plans to keep them on the platform anyway.
• Values a no-monthly-fee structure, a free plastic card, and access to ATM withdrawals in over 190 countries.
• Is comfortable with the fact that the conversion spread is not published, and is happy to pay it.

I would not recommend it if you:

• Live outside the UK and EU. The card is simply not available to you today.
• Need to fund the card from a wide range of networks with clear network-by-network documentation, because the supported networks are not listed publicly.
• Plan to keep most of your net worth on the platform and would suffer a lot from a multi-day account freeze. The complaint themes make this a real consideration.
• Want a card whose conversion cost is fully visible at the point of sale. Krak’s “no fees” claim is real on the fee side, but the spread is the price you actually pay, and it is not disclosed.

For most people in the card’s target audience, the Krak card is a fair deal: not the cheapest in absolute terms, but a credible “spend your crypto” card backed by a long-running exchange and a regulated issuer. For everyone else, the country list alone is enough to look elsewhere.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Krak card?

The Krak card is a Mastercard debit card that spends the balance in your Krak Everyday account. It is issued by Monavate in the UK and by Monavate UAB in the EEA, and it is the consumer card product of Kraken’s app.

How does the Krak card work?

You fund a Krak Everyday account with crypto or fiat, set a spend order in the app, and the card draws on those balances at the point of sale. Crypto balances are converted to the card’s primary currency (GBP for UK cards, EUR for EEA cards) at the Mastercard rate plus a variable spread.

Is Krak a bank?

No. Krak is a brand of Kraken, a crypto exchange. The card itself is issued by Monavate, which is an electronic money institution, not a bank. Funds on the platform are not covered by deposit guarantee schemes.

Who owns Krak?

Krak is the consumer app of Kraken, the cryptocurrency exchange. The card is issued by Monavate (UK, FCA reference 901097) and by Monavate UAB in Lithuania (licence number 92), so the regulated entity behind the card is Monavate, not Krak or Kraken.

Is the Krak card available in my country?

Currently the card is open to residents of the UK and the EU, with more countries said to be coming soon. A Krak help article also lists US residents for personal accounts, which is broader than the card-page wording. The safest answer is to check the eligibility screen in the app, because the official scope is narrower than the broader Kraken account.

How do I get a Krak card?

Open and verify a Krak account, complete KYC, and order a card from inside the app. The virtual card is available within minutes; the physical card is free and is shipped to UK and EEA delivery addresses. The metal card requires an average of GBP/EUR 50,000 in combined assets across Krak, Kraken and Kraken Pro.

Does the Krak card require KYC?

Yes. You must have a verified Krak account with completed KYC, and the issuer must verify your identity before issuing a card. The specific documents required are not listed on the public card pages and are determined by the verification flow in the app.

How do I top up the Krak card?

You fund the underlying Krak Everyday account, and the card spends that balance. Funding methods include bank deposits via Plaid for EUR and GBP, PayPal in some regions, and crypto transfers. Some deposit methods carry a 3-day hold before withdrawals are allowed, and the supported blockchain networks for crypto are not listed on the card pages.

How do I add the Krak card to Apple Wallet?

Apple Pay is supported on the official wallet list, so the in-app flow is the normal tokenisation process. Google Pay is mentioned in third-party sources but not in the official wallet support pages, so I would check in the app for current availability.

Is the Krak card safe?

The issuer is regulated in the UK and Lithuania, and the card offers standard controls like instant freeze, real-time monitoring, and the ability to block specific currencies from being spent. The risks worth weighing are the undisclosed conversion spread, the absence of deposit-guarantee coverage, and the user-reported pattern of accounts restricted after deposits, which can leave funds temporarily inaccessible.

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