Adding MetaMask Card to Apple Pay and Google Pay

Adding the card to a phone wallet takes a minute and is worth it for reasons beyond convenience.

The phone wallet replaces your card number with a device token

The phone wallet does not store your card number. It stores a device-specific token that stands in for it, so the merchant never sees the real number and a database breach at their end cannot expose it. Each payment is authorised by your face, fingerprint or passcode, which also makes a stolen phone far less useful to whoever took it.

For a virtual card this is what makes in-person payment possible at all. For a physical card it is still the safer of the two ways to pay.

The wallet side, the cap and the fees all stay the same

Everything on the wallet side is untouched. The payment still draws on the same spending cap, still spends the same enabled token from the same network, and still needs the cap to cover the amount. Adding the card to a phone does not create a separate balance or a separate limit.

The fee side is unchanged too. Conversion spread and any cross-border fee apply exactly as they would with the card number.

A tokenised payment sometimes succeeds where the card number fails

Some declines are specific to how the card details were entered rather than to the account. A payment that fails on the card number sometimes succeeds through the phone wallet, because it travels as a tokenised transaction rather than a keyed-in one.

That makes it a useful second option to have configured before you need it — particularly abroad, where diagnosing a decline at the counter is not practical.

Mobile wallet support is one of the fields we track on every listing, including MetaMask Card.