Buy bitcoin with Credit or debit card

What is Credit or debit card?

Credit and debit card payments run over the international card networks, mainly Visa and Mastercard, alongside American Express and domestic schemes such as Cartes Bancaires in France or RuPay in India. Your issuing bank authorises each payment in real time, so the funds are committed the moment the transaction is approved. Visa alone says it connects businesses, banks and governments in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, which is why this is the most widely available way to fund an exchange account. It is also the rail most likely to be repriced or blocked by your own bank.

Speed

Authorisation is real time, so a card deposit normally lands within seconds and rarely takes more than a few minutes.

Cost

The networks bill the merchant rather than you, but many issuers class a crypto purchase as a cash advance, and the CFPB notes that interest on a cash advance generally starts from the transaction date with no grace period.

Limits

Your issuer sets the per transaction and daily ceiling, and a card that works fine for ordinary retail can still be declined on a crypto merchant category.

Speed and cost describe the rail itself. What an exchange adds on top varies by platform and is shown per exchange below.

Caveats by country

Where Credit or debit card exists but comes with strings attached, straight from the country research.

Benin

limited issuance

Bosnia and Herzegovina

your bank may decline a payment to a crypto platform

Burkina Faso

limited issuance

Cameroon

rarely works with local banks

Canada

often treated as a cash advance

Central African Republic

where available

Cote d'Ivoire

limited issuance

DR Congo

limited issuance

Equatorial Guinea

often blocked by local banks

Eritrea

rarely available

Fiji

the RBF bars locally issued cards for crypto purchases

Gabon

limited issuance

Guinea

limited

Guinea Bissau

limited issuance

India

often blocked by issuing banks

Liberia

limited

Macao

often blocked by local banks

Mali

limited issuance

Mauritania

limited acceptance

Morocco

often blocked by local banks

Niger

limited issuance

Pakistan

often blocked for crypto

Palestine

where available

Republic of the Congo

rarely works

São Tomé and Príncipe

limited acceptance

Saudi Arabia

some Saudi banks decline crypto merchants

Senegal

limited issuance

Somalia

limited

South Sudan

rare

Sri Lanka

blocked by most local banks

Togo

limited issuance

Turkey

on card on-ramps that have not filed with the Capital Markets Board

Turkmenistan

subject to strict currency controls

Turkmenistan

subject to strict currency controls

Venezuela

limited

Western Sahara

often blocked by local banks

Zimbabwe

limited