A Kazakh tenge card that spends USDT, with a short list of places to use it

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The #CryptoPay card is one of the more unusual payment cards you can get today. It is issued by a real Kazakh bank, Bank CenterCredit, but the money on the back end is held in USDT inside an account at the crypto exchange ATAIX Eurasia. When you tap to pay, USDT is converted into Kazakh tenge on the spot and the merchant is paid in tenge from a regular Mastercard World Black. The card is digital, it only works in physical stores, and at the time of writing it is only available to people who live in Kazakhstan and already have an ATAIX account of the right kind. That combination of features explains both why the card has a narrow audience and why it is interesting at all.

This review walks through who can actually get one, what the day-to-day costs look like, how the top-up and the everyday payment work, where the risks sit, and which other cards you might look at instead. The information is taken from the card’s own pages and from the bank’s tariff, cross-checked where it was possible to do so. I have not used the card myself; what follows is a reading of the public material, not a personal test.

Conditions on this page are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

The bank behind #CryptoPay is licensed, the exchange is regulated in Kazakhstan, and the crypto-to-fiat conversion is described as zero-fee. On the other hand, you can only spend the card at a shop’s payment terminal, you cannot take cash out, you cannot pay online, and the only crypto you can load is USDT. The card is therefore best understood as a small, tightly defined tool for a specific user, not a general-purpose spending card.

In my reading of the public material, the card earns a total of 5.0 out of 10. The score below is the basis for that total.

The card is a good fit if you are a Kazakhstan resident, you already hold or trade USDT on ATAIX Eurasia, and you want a simple way to spend that USDT at local shops without first exchanging it for tenge on an external platform. It is a poor fit if you need cash from an ATM, want to pay online, hold crypto other than USDT, live outside Kazakhstan, or want a card with a transparent foreign-exchange fee.

Will they give you the card

The eligibility rules for #CryptoPay are short and quite restrictive, so it is worth going through them in plain language before reading the rest of the review.

First, the card is positioned for residents of Kazakhstan. The bank’s tariff table states the issue fee as “10,000 ₸ for residents of the Republic of Kazakhstan”, which I read as “10,000 tenge for residents of the Republic of Kazakhstan”. The card is opened inside the bcc.kz mobile banking app, and the steps assume you have an account with Bank CenterCredit already.

Second, the card sits on top of a crypto account at ATAIX Eurasia. To open it you need an ATAIX Eurasia account with either “Investor” or “Premium” status. The card’s own pages describe the process in those terms, and the higher the ATAIX status, the higher the monthly spending limit on the card. The base monthly limit, with the default ATAIX status, is 500,000 ₸. After you confirm the “Investor” qualification, that ceiling rises to 45,000,000 ₸ per month. The page does not say what each ATAIX status requires, how long the verification takes, or what reason might lead to a rejection, so the practical question of “will they accept me” depends on ATAIX’s own onboarding, which is not fully spelled out in the public material.

Third, citizenship rules for the card itself are not stated on the pages I read. What is stated is the bank’s pricing is for Kazakhstan residents, and the exchange’s own behaviour. According to a 5 December 2023 report by Snob, ATAIX Eurasia asked Russian citizens and companies resident in Russia to close their accounts, citing the exchange’s compliance with EU sanctions on Russia. A later summary, also from December 2023, says new Russian users were no longer able to register. These are unofficial third-party reports and not the card issuer speaking, but they are relevant if you are reading this from outside Kazakhstan and wondering whether your nationality might matter.

In short: if you live in Kazakhstan, have a Bank CenterCredit account in the bcc.kz app and an ATAIX Eurasia account with at least “Investor” status, the card is available to you. If any of those three legs is missing, the card is not on offer to you in the way the public material describes.

How to get it

The signup path has four steps and runs across two apps. You start on the crypto side, then move to the bank side, then back to confirm.

Step one is to register on ATAIX Eurasia and pass the exchange’s identification checks (KYC) so that your account reaches “Investor” or “Premium” status. The card’s own page presents this as a prerequisite; the exchange’s separate pages describe the verification in general terms. The card page does not say which documents, proof of address or minimum age is required at this stage; that information would be on ATAIX’s own onboarding flow rather than on the card’s product page.

Step two is to install the bcc.kz app, sign in to your Bank CenterCredit account and choose “New product or account” → #CryptoPay → “Open card”. The card is opened inside the bank’s app, not on ATAIX.

Step three is to confirm the card opening. An e-mail is sent to the address you used at ATAIX, and the ATAIX page says this happens within two hours. The card then becomes visible in the bank’s app and is ready to be added to a mobile wallet.

Step four is to add the card to Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. The card is digital-only on issue, and these are the three ways to actually use it at a terminal.

A few things are worth knowing. There is no mention in the public material of how long the whole flow takes from end to end, of any cooling-off period, or of what happens if the e-mail confirmation does not arrive. The card’s stated validity is eight years. The bank tariff table does mention a plastic card “pre-ordered by the client” that can be collected in a branch or by a notarised power of attorney valid for up to three years, so a physical version does exist on request, but the delivery time, cost and replacement cost for that plastic card are not stated.

What it really costs: fees, limits and three everyday payments

The fee picture for #CryptoPay is unusual because some of the headline numbers look very low while the absence of certain fees is a worry rather than a comfort.

The Costs table below puts the stated numbers side by side. The figures come from the bank tariff and the card’s product page; where a fee is “not stated”, I have written that rather than guess.

Three everyday payments help make that list more concrete.

Payment one: you buy groceries for 12,000 ₸ at a supermarket in Almaty, paid by tapping your phone in a shop. There is no conversion fee, the card page says. The card page does not name a separate FX fee, so on the face of it the 12,000 ₸ is debited in tenge and a roughly equivalent amount of USDT is removed from your ATAIX balance at the rate the exchange shows at the moment of payment. There is no cashback surprise here beyond the basic 0.5% (capped at 20,000 ₸ per month), so you receive about 60 ₸ back into the same flow.

Payment two: you pay 8,000 ₸ for dinner with friends, again by tapping at a restaurant. Same rules. Conversion at 0%, no payment fee, USDT sold for tenge in the background. The 0.5% cashback is 40 ₸. The 5,000 ₸ monthly service fee is independent of whether you used the card at all, so the dinner and the supermarket trip together returned you 100 ₸ against a 5,000 ₸ fixed monthly cost.

Payment three: you try to take out 20,000 ₸ from an ATM. You cannot. The card’s page is explicit: “No, cash withdrawal at ATMs is unavailable”. So an ATM scenario is a non-event. If you need cash from your USDT balance, the path is to sell USDT on ATAIX and then withdraw tenge through a regular Bank CenterCredit channel, with its own fees.

The foreign-exchange fee is the figure most worth your attention. The card spends in tenge only. If you ever used it abroad, Mastercard would handle the conversion from tenge into the local currency and an FX margin would normally apply, but the card’s own page does not state that margin. The public material does not describe the card as a travel product; the product as described is a domestic tenge card, so for the intended use this gap may not bite. For a reader who hoped the card would work overseas, the absence of an FX disclosure is itself the answer: this is not presented as a travel card.

How to top up the card

The top-up path is shaped by two facts: only USDT is supported on the card, and the USDT is held at ATAIX Eurasia, not at the bank.

To get USDT onto the card you first need USDT in your ATAIX wallet. ATAIX lists USDT on three networks: BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum and TRON. The deposit fee the exchange advertises is 0.00, the minimum deposit is 0.01 USDT, and the wallet is credited once the network confirms the transfer. On-chain network fees for the deposit itself are paid by the sender to the blockchain, not to ATAIX; the page does not state those fees for the user’s side, and they will vary by network and congestion. If you are sending from another exchange or from your own wallet, send only on the network ATAIX lists, send only USDT and not another token, and double-check the address; a wrong network or a wrong token is the most common way to lose funds and the network cannot reverse it.

A second path is to top up the wallet with fiat and then convert to USDT inside ATAIX. The card page does not show a direct “buy USDT” button, but the exchange’s own flow is to receive tenge by transfer and then trade on the order book. The card page does not state the fee for that conversion at the exchange level; the card-level conversion is 0%, but the exchange’s trading fees for buying USDT with tenge are a separate line item, and the public material in front of me does not state them.

A third path is to use the “Cryptocurrency” section of the bcc.kz app. This appears to be a thin layer over the same ATAIX wallet, so the same rules apply: only USDT, only on the three networks listed, and at the exchange’s deposit terms.

A few practical details round this out. There is no minimum top-up above the 0.01 USDT deposit floor at the exchange, but the card has a 5,000 ₸ monthly servicing fee, so topping up just to “have a balance” is not free; the running cost is independent of the balance. There is no auto top-up described. Refunds from the merchant, if you ever get one, go back to the crypto wallet rather than to a bank balance, and from there you can convert to USDT in ATAIX. Withdrawal to a bank account or to an ATM from the card is not available; the card’s design is to spend, not to move money out.

Paying with the card every day

The everyday use of the card is narrow but well-defined: a digital-only Mastercard World Black that lives in your phone’s wallet and pays tenge at a physical terminal.

The card supports Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. The card’s product page confirms that it can be added to all three. Because the card is digital on issue, those mobile wallets are the only way the card exists at a terminal, unless you separately pre-order a plastic version from the bank. Online payments are not available, and the card page is explicit on that point. The card can therefore be used in shops, cafés, restaurants, taxi apps that accept contactless in person, and so on, but it cannot be used to type a card number into a website.

There is no published list of blocked merchant categories for this card. Mastercard’s standard merchant category codes still apply, and blocked categories vary by issuer, so for specific edge cases (gambling, cryptocurrency merchants, certain adult content, some subscription services) the only safe assumption is to test the card with a small amount first.

On the rewards side, the card page describes a basic 0.5% cashback on all purchases, capped at 20,000 ₸ per month. The currency of the cashback is not stated. Mastercard World Black itself comes with a small bundle of perks, as published on the bank’s product page: up to ten Lounge Key visits per year, up to ten Fast Track passes at airports, and travel insurance up to US$1.5 million. None of these is specific to #CryptoPay; they are the standard perks that come with the card tier at Bank CenterCredit.

Two app-rating points are worth a brief mention. The bank’s app is bcc.kz; I did not record its App Store or Google Play rating. The ATAIX Eurasia app, as of 21 October 2026, has an App Store rating in Kazakhstan of 3.5 out of 5, from a small sample of eight ratings, so it should be read as a thin signal rather than a strong endorsement. App ratings are not a security claim; they are one input.

If something goes wrong with a purchase, the card’s page says refunds are credited to the crypto wallet, and from there the user can convert back to USDT in the ATAIX app or website. The dispute and chargeback procedure, the time frames, the documents the user would need to provide, and the cases in which the bank would intervene on the user’s behalf, are not stated on the public pages.

What can go wrong

The risks fall into three groups: the limits of the product itself, the issuer and exchange side, and the wider environment in which crypto and payment cards live.

The product limits are the easiest to plan for. There is no online payment, no ATM withdrawal, no FX disclosure, and no multi-currency balance: the card is a domestic tenge card. The monthly fee of 5,000 ₸ is fixed and runs even if you do not use the card, so leaving a low balance on it is expensive in percentage terms. The cashback cap of 20,000 ₸ per month is generous by local standards but is the only cashback structure on offer; there is no tier system with extra perks. The 0.5% cashback is a low headline rate compared with several of the alternatives discussed below, and the 5,000 ₸ monthly service fee means you have to spend enough in a month to make the cashback plus the convenience worth more than the fee.

The issuer and exchange side looks solid on paper. The card is issued by Bank CenterCredit, one of Kazakhstan’s established banks, under banking licence No. 1.1.856.145 dated 5 August 2026 from the Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market. The crypto side is run by ATAIX Eurasia Ltd., based in Astana at Mangilik El 55/17, and the exchange holds AFSA licence AFSA-A-LA-2025-0022 dated 15 October 2025, which covers a digital asset trading facility, custody, and dealing in digital assets as principal and agent. AFSA is the Astana Financial Services Authority, the regulator for the Astana International Financial Centre. That pair of licences is a real regulatory floor, not just a marketing claim. No public complaint pages for CryptoPay or ATAIX came up in my searches of Trustpilot or Reddit, and the regulator has not published incident notices about this product.

The wider environment is where the more interesting risks live. Crypto held in a custodial wallet at a regulated exchange is still a custodial position: the exchange holds the credentials, and the user relies on the exchange to keep them safe. Past failures of custodial platforms in the wider industry (Mt. Gox, Coincheck, Ronin Network) are the reason the public pages of any serious exchange emphasise licensing and segregation. For #CryptoPay, the card itself is a bank product, so the cardholder does not touch crypto custody through the card; the user already has a custodial position at ATAIX because they hold USDT there, and the card simply spends from that position.

Two further risks come from the way the card is structured. The first is that the card spends only USDT; if you hold any other crypto on ATAIX, you have to convert it to USDT before spending, which means an extra trade and a spread. The second is that, while Tether states that USDT is intended to be backed 1-to-1, USDT is not the same as a bank deposit; its value depends on Tether’s reserves and the market’s confidence in them, and stablecoins have lost their peg before (TerraUSD in 2022, USDC briefly in March 2023). The card does not change that risk, but a user who has just spent USDT through the card should not be surprised to see the rate move.

There is one more risk worth flagging. Network fees for the deposit are not stated on the card’s pages; the deposit fee at the exchange is 0.00, but the user pays the underlying blockchain network in the network’s own asset (gas on Ethereum and on BNB Smart Chain, bandwidth and energy on TRON). For small top-ups, the network fee can be a meaningful percentage. The card’s own minimum of 0.01 USDT is a floor, not a recommended amount; sending 1 USDT on Ethereum in a busy moment can cost more in gas than the deposit is worth.

What to take instead

#CryptoPay is a specific product for a specific user, so the alternatives that matter are the ones that solve a similar problem for a similar reader, not the ones that have the most features. Three are worth looking at alongside it. None of them is a direct substitute: each trades different features in and out of the same basic idea.

Young Card

Young Card is a crypto-linked card with a published score of 5.7 out of 10 in the same comparison. Its cashback is paid in the platform’s own YNG token, and the rate depends on the user’s club tier: Essential at 0.1%, Gold at 1.8% and Platinum at 3.6%; Bronze and Silver are not stated publicly. The country list, fees and card form factor for Young Card are not stated on its public pages, so the comparison here is limited to the cashback model. Compared with #CryptoPay, the headline reward is higher at the upper tiers, but the reward is in a token issued by the card brand rather than in fiat, which is a different kind of upside and a different kind of risk.

Coinbase Card

Coinbase Card is a Visa prepaid debit card available in all US states except Hawaii, with a published score of 6.4 out of 10. Account opening follows the USA PATRIOT Act identity rules, so you give your name, address, date of birth and ID; no other countries are supported on the public pages. The card is virtual or physical, and every payment converts the user’s crypto balance to US dollars at the time of the transaction. Coinbase charges no spending fees and no annual fees, and there is no Coinbase transaction fee at payment, but a spread applies when Coinbase buys, sells or trades crypto to do that conversion, so the cost is hidden in the rate rather than in a line item. The card can be funded by linking a bank account or by depositing part of a paycheck into Coinbase at zero fees, and a crypto balance held on Coinbase can be spent directly. US card users can opt into crypto rewards on every purchase, with a rate that varies and is shown in the app; the user picks from a rotating set of reward assets. Compared with #CryptoPay, the geographic scope is the United States, the supported cryptos are the ones on the user’s Coinbase account rather than USDT only, and the fee structure is a spread rather than a stated zero, so the comparison is about the model as much as the numbers.

OKX card

OKX offers a Mastercard debit card launched in the European Union plus Norway on 28 January 2026, with a published score of 6.2 out of 10. Iceland and Liechtenstein are excluded on the explainer’s list, although the same explainer concludes that the card is for the “entire EEA” — the two statements are inconsistent and the narrower list is the safer one to read. The card is euro-denominated and virtual, issued through a European licensed payment provider; the press release does not mention a physical version. The card fee is none, there is no OKX transaction fee and no OKX foreign-exchange fee, and conversion happens at the moment of payment. The conversion spread is given as 0.1% in the May 2026 explainer but as 0.4% in the launch press release, and the two are inconsistent; the explainer is the more recent document, so 0.1% is the better current reading. The card is funded from USDC or USDG held in OKX Pay; other coins must be converted first, and there is no auto top-up — if the balance is short, the payment is declined. Rewards are paid in cashback on USDG purchases only (USDC earns nothing), with monthly caps in euros that vary by user tier: Regular 2% capped at 10, VIP1 4% capped at 300, VIP2 4.5% capped at 450, VIP3 5% capped at 1,000, and VIP4+ 10% capped at 1,000 — although the same page describes a “2 to 5%” range and a “10%” tier, which is internally inconsistent. A launch promo offered up to 20% VIP and 15% regular for a 30-day window. Compared with #CryptoPay, OKX is euro-denominated, USDC- and USDG-led rather than USDT-led, and rewards are richer but tied to a different stablecoin.

The table below sets the three alternatives next to #CryptoPay at a glance, on the same points I have facts for.

A short note on how to read this table: the columns are deliberately uneven, because the public material is uneven. The right way to use it is to identify which of these columns matches your situation, and then read the row down from there.

Who I would recommend the card to

The honest answer is that the audience for #CryptoPay is narrow, and a recommendation only makes sense inside that narrow audience.

I would recommend the card to a Kazakhstan resident who already has an ATAIX Eurasia account with “Investor” or “Premium” status, holds USDT on that account, and wants a way to spend that USDT at local shops without first going through an external exchange. For that reader, the combination of a licensed bank issuer, a regulated exchange, zero stated conversion fees, a free wallet top-up, and a domestic Mastercard with mobile wallet support is a clean solution. The 5,000 ₸ monthly fee is the one number that has to make sense for that reader; for someone who spends 200,000 ₸ or more per month on the card, the fee is a small percentage, and the 0.5% cashback plus the Mastercard World Black perks are a useful top-up. For someone who spends 20,000 ₸ per month, the fee is large in comparison and the card is hard to justify on cost grounds alone.

I would not recommend the card to a reader who lives outside Kazakhstan, who needs cash from an ATM, who wants to pay online, who holds crypto other than USDT, who wants a multi-currency travel card, or who is not already an ATAIX Eurasia user. The card is not a general-purpose payment card, and trying to use it as one will hit one of the walls described above within the first week.

If you are at the start of the journey rather than the middle — that is, you are in Kazakhstan, you do not yet have an ATAIX account and you are considering opening one specifically to get this card — the right first question is whether the 5,000 ₸ monthly fee will be smaller than the spread and trading fees you would pay to convert USDT to tenge another way. If the answer is yes, the card earns its place. If the answer is no, the card is a small premium product and the alternative of using a regular tenge debit card with a separate exchange is more economical.

Frequently asked questions

What is the #CryptoPay card?

#CryptoPay is a digital Mastercard World Black debit card issued by Bank CenterCredit in Kazakhstan, paired with a USDT balance held at the crypto exchange ATAIX Eurasia. When you pay at a shop, USDT is converted to tenge at the moment of payment and the merchant is paid in tenge from a regular Mastercard transaction. The card is positioned for Kazakhstan residents who already have an ATAIX account.

How does the #CryptoPay card work?

The card sits on top of your USDT balance at ATAIX Eurasia. You top up your USDT wallet (on BSC, Ethereum or TRON), then add the card to Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. At payment, USDT is converted to tenge at the exchange rate at that moment, the bank debits the tenge from the card, and the merchant receives a normal Mastercard transaction in tenge. The card’s own conversion fee is 0%.

Is #CryptoPay a bank?

No. #CryptoPay is a card product offered jointly by Bank CenterCredit (which issues the card and the bank account in tenge) and ATAIX Eurasia (which provides the USDT balance and the crypto-to-fiat conversion). The bank side is licensed by the Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market, and the exchange side is licensed by the Astana Financial Services Authority.

Who owns #CryptoPay?

#CryptoPay is a co-branded product. The card is issued by Bank CenterCredit, one of Kazakhstan’s established banks, and the USDT balance is held at ATAIX Eurasia Ltd., a digital asset exchange based in Astana. Ownership of the brand itself is not stated on the public pages I read; what is stated is the issuer and the exchange partner.

Is the #CryptoPay card available in my country?

The card is positioned for residents of Kazakhstan. The bank’s tariff states the issue fee is 10,000 ₸ for residents of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and the steps run through the bcc.kz app, which is a Kazakh product. The card’s pages do not describe availability in other countries. Citizenship rules are not stated on the card’s pages; for context, ATAIX Eurasia has previously asked Russian citizens resident in Russia to close accounts (a third-party report from December 2023).

How do I get the #CryptoPay card?

You register on ATAIX Eurasia and pass identification to reach “Investor” or “Premium” status, install the bcc.kz app, choose “New product or account” → #CryptoPay → “Open card”, confirm the card by e-mail within two hours, and add it to Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. The documents and age required for ATAIX KYC are not stated on the card’s pages.

Does the #CryptoPay card require KYC?

Yes, in two layers. You need an ATAIX Eurasia account with “Investor” or “Premium” status, which involves ATAIX’s own KYC checks, and you need a Bank CenterCredit account to use the bcc.kz app. The specific documents, age threshold and processing time are not stated on the card’s product page.

How do I top up the #CryptoPay card?

You top up the USDT wallet at ATAIX Eurasia, and the card spends from that wallet. USDT is accepted on BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum and TRON, with a minimum deposit of 0.01 USDT and an exchange deposit fee of 0.00. On-chain network fees for the deposit itself are paid by the sender to the blockchain and are not stated on the card’s pages.

Can I withdraw cash from the #CryptoPay card at an ATM?

No. The card’s product page is explicit that cash withdrawal at ATMs is not available. If you need tenge in cash from your USDT balance, you would sell USDT on ATAIX and use a regular Bank CenterCredit channel to take cash out, with its own fees.

Is the #CryptoPay card safe?

The card has a real regulatory floor: a Kazakh banking licence on the card side and an AFSA licence on the exchange side. The card itself is a regular bank card, and your USDT sits in a custodial wallet at the licensed exchange. The main risks are the usual ones for any custodial crypto product (counterparty risk at the exchange, the card’s narrow functionality, and the cost of the monthly fee relative to your spend).

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