Coinsbank Bitcoin debit card review
Those who don’t follow Bitcoin tend to think buying BTC is easy, but spending it is difficult. This is not true, at least in theory. There are a dozen Bitcoin debit cards, making it easy to use your cryptocurrency wherever MasterCard or Visa is accepted. If they work as advertised, well, that’s another story.
Why Coinsbank?
A few months ago I’ve ordered my first card from Wirex (néé e-coin). The problem is I was never able to top it up. It just doesn’t work for me, and if you skim through the reviews in Google Play or in the App Store you will see I’m not alone. I’ve tried reaching out to them — the contact feature is broken in the app, and they weren’t able to solve my problem in email yet, either. They are working on it.
So I’ve ordered another card, this time from Coinsbank (néé Bit-X). It’s a fairly respected exchange with great trading features, built by a competent team. I was really looking forward to use their card, and here’s my review.
They have several card tiers from anonymous virtual cards to (almost) no-limits plastics. I’ve ordered something called a “Named White” card. It comes at a price (almost a hundred bucks), but it offers by far the best conditions, including a relatively low foreign exchange fee. This is great for digital nomads who tend to spend in many different currencies.
It took about three working days to have my card made, and only 24 hours to DHL it to my address in Europe, from Malaga in Spain. Why Malaga? Because the card, as most of the BTC cards, is issued by Wave Crest, a white label card provider from Gibraltar.
Unboxing
It came in a nondescript DHL envelope:
Coinsbank included their promo materials and a few “business cards” with the QR code of my wallet. It’s a great idea:
The envelope is nicely padded. That’s a good thing considering the card doesn’t have a case or anything else to protect it. They should steal the insanely cool packaging of Revolut!
And here is the card itself:
First shock: it says “Blue card”. I’ve ordered a “White card”. It turned out it’s “just the design”, but it’s still a “White card” fee-wise. A bit lame. The card itself is thick and it feels sturdy, but the design is underwhelming and print quality is not great. The (otherwise useless) Wirex card, also from Wave Crest, looks incomparably nicer. The QR code “business cards” also feel cheap.
Card activation is easy on the Coinsbank website, all you need is a 6 digit code that came in the same envelope.
Coin banks need to grow up
It was smooth sailing up till now, but this is where the problems started.
First, my card appeared to be limited with a lifetime turnover limit of $2500 and a daily ATM withdrawal limit of $200. My “Card Level 1” magically jumped to “Card Level 2” after an hour or so, but those are essentially the same; I need “Card Level 3”. Their support got back to me saying “the bank still have to check your documents”, which is very confusing considering I have the highest possible KYC verification level at Coinsbank (which, by the way, is not a bank). KYC verification for the Coinsbank trading account and the card should be in sync.
Second, I couldn’t get my PIN code for two days. Supposedly, you can check your PIN anytime on the Coinsbank site, but it was not working. I did my own investigation, and it turned out their PIN script was broken (503 Service Unavailable in the JavaScript console). I both reached out the their customer support on the site and tweeted my diagnosis tagging @Coins_Bank.
It took the customer support 72 hours to reply. By then the problem has been solved, as their social media guys were quicker and informed their developers who deployed a fix in about 12 hours. Except the fix didn’t work. It took another couple of hours to finally get my PIN.
Imagine what would happen if your “real” bank had this PIN issue. Or if your “real” bank needed 72 hours to reply. You’d find it completely unacceptable, right?
This is exactly the problem with both BTC card providers I’ve tried so far. The “hardware” might be there but the “software” is not. If these companies aim to compete with the big banks they need better processes, an engineering team focusing more on operations and a better customer-facing team.
Current BTC cards do work, sort of, but the current situation doesn’t create trust. It’s not something I’d recommend to my mom or even to my less tech-savvy friends.
All’s well that ends well
Coinsbank finally sorted out the PIN issue and the card now works perfectly (although with Level 2 limits). All in all, I am a happy customer. Here’s my first purchase with my Coinsbank card, two public transport tickets in Budapest:
