How to Send Someone a Gift Card You Bought with Crypto

Every other guide on this site assumes you are buying for yourself. This one does not. Buying a gift card with crypto and buying a gift card as a gift are the same checkout and two completely different problems — because the moment a second person is involved, three things that never mattered suddenly decide whether the gift works at all: which inbox the code lands in, which country the recipient will redeem it in, and how the code travels the last few metres from you to them. We sell 81 brands across 385 regional variants, and only 21 of them survive a recipient whose country you are not sure about. Here is how to pick, and how to hand it over.

Nothing here requires an account, on your side or theirs. There is no gift-wrapping step, no scheduled-delivery calendar, no "from" field. What you are buying is a code, and a code is a bearer instrument: whoever holds it owns the value. That simplicity is the whole appeal and the whole risk, and both are worth understanding before you spend anything.

#What actually arrives, and in whose inbox

After your crypto deposit confirms on-chain, we email the code — as text, in about 11 minutes, to the address typed into the Delivery email field at checkout. That is the entire delivery mechanism. There is no physical card in the post, no PDF certificate with a ribbon on it, no message field, and no way to schedule the send for Christmas morning.

The important part is the one most people skim past: the delivery email is a free-text field, not your account address, because there is no account. You can type your own address and forward the code yourself, or you can type the recipient's address and have the code go straight to them. Both are legitimate; they fail in different ways, which is the subject of the handover section below.

One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it surprises people: the code is not displayed on the payment page after you pay. If you send it to someone else's inbox, you will never see it. That is exactly what you want when the point is a surprise, and exactly what hurts when you fat-finger the address. Keep the order number — order lookup takes the order number plus the delivery email and will bring the order back up, which means a typo'd address is recoverable only if you can work out what you actually typed.

#Settle one question before you pay: where will they redeem it

This is the single decision that separates a gift that works from a gift that becomes an awkward conversation. A gift card is not money — it is a claim against one company's ledger, and most large companies keep a separate ledger per country. A code issued against the German ledger is not "worth less" on the American one; it is simply not recognised. Our region-lock guide covers the mechanism in depth. What matters for gifting is that the catalogue sorts into exactly four behaviours, and only two of them are safe when you are guessing.

Thirty-three of the 81 brands are region-locked, and they include most of the ones you would think of first: Amazon, Apple, Nike, IKEA, PlayStation, Netflix. They are excellent gifts if you know where the person shops. They are the worst possible gifts if you are guessing, because there is no partial credit: a US Amazon code on amazon.de does nothing at all.

#The 21 brands you can give without knowing where they live

Twenty-one brands — the eight billing-currency ones and the thirteen global ones — redeem through a single worldwide portal or a single worldwide account. The currency on the card affects what the recipient is quoted, never whether the code is accepted. These are the cards to reach for when the recipient lives somewhere you are not certain about, or moves around.

Two honest caveats about that list. The USD-priced global cards are priced in dollars, not localised — a recipient in Warsaw redeems fine but is thinking in złoty, so a $50 card reads as an odd number to them. And several of the global entries are narrow by design: Foundation sells hardware wallets, Bankless sells research, Jawaker sells card-game tokens. They are superb gifts for exactly one kind of person and baffling for everyone else. The broad, safe, everybody-likes-this end of this table is the experience cards, which is where most gift shopping should start.

#Experience cards: the ones actually built for this

Three brands in the catalogue exist for no purpose other than being given away, and they solve the country problem completely: the recipient picks the experience, the city and the date after they receive the code, from a global catalogue. Nothing is fixed at purchase except how much you spent.

The distinction in the middle column decides which one you want. Tinggly is one-shot: the recipient redeems the voucher for a single experience at the tier you bought, and there is no leftover balance if they pick something cheaper. That makes the tier you choose the whole gift — buy generously or you hand someone a catalogue they find thin. ActivityGIFT and BucketListGift behave like store credit: the balance can be split across several bookings or topped up with a second code, which is far more forgiving and lets two people club together on one big gift by buying two codes.

Tinggly's four-year validity is the longest in the category and worth knowing when the gift is aspirational — a skydive nobody books in the first winter is still good three years later. All three redeem through their own global portal and need only a free email-and-password account on the recipient's side. No ID, no phone number, no card on file. Browse the whole set on the experiences category.

#When you do know their country

If you are certain where the person shops, the 33 region-locked brands become the strongest gifts in the catalogue, because they are the ones people actually use weekly. Pick the variant matching the storefront they will check out on, not the country they live in — those are usually the same, but not for someone who shops on a US account from abroad, or who has just moved.

Two forgiving middle-ground options are worth knowing. Zalando is currency-locked rather than country-locked, so a single EUR voucher works on every euro-billing Zalando site across the Eurozone — one code covering Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and the rest. And most of the 27 wallet-currency brands — Steam, Roblox, Epic Games — credit a globally-accessible account in a fixed currency, so the account travels even when the currency does not. For a gamer whose country you are unsure of, a wallet-currency card is a much better bet than a region-locked store card. The full breakdown by title is in buying game credit with crypto.

One category to avoid gifting blind: prepaid vouchers. paysafecard, Neosurf and the rest are excellent instruments, but acceptance is merchant-by-merchant and country-by-country, so they reward a recipient who already knows they want one. Our voucher guide covers where each is accepted.

#Two ways to hand it over, and what each costs you

Once the brand is settled, the delivery-email field is the only remaining decision, and it is a genuine trade-off rather than a right answer.

If you send to their address, warn them it is coming and tell them the sender, or a code worth real money sits unread in a promotions tab looking exactly like spam. And check the address character by character before submitting — with no account on either side, a mistyped domain sends a bearer instrument to a stranger.

#Getting the code to them without getting it stolen

A gift card code is a bearer instrument: it does not know who bought it and it does not care who redeems it. Whoever types it in first gets the money, and there is no reversal. That is the same property that makes these cards useful for the unbanked and attractive to thieves, and it means the last few metres deserve the same care as the payment itself.

• Never post a code image publicly. Not in a group chat with 40 people, not on a story, not in a "look what I got you" photo. Scrapers read screenshots, and a drained code is unrecoverable.
• Prefer one private channel and delete afterwards. A one-to-one message the recipient can delete once redeemed beats an email thread that lives in two mailboxes forever.
• Tell them to redeem promptly. Redeeming moves the value onto their own account, where it is protected by their password. An unredeemed code sitting in a chat log is protected by nothing.
• Split the code from the context. If you are being careful, send the code in one message and which brand it is for in another. On its own, a bare string is far less useful to anyone who stumbles on it.
• Never let a third party choose the card for you. If someone you did not initiate contact with is telling you which card to buy and asking for the code — a "tax office", a "support agent", a romance, a boss messaging from a new number — that is a scam, without exception. The scam guide covers all three variants.

If the recipient hits an error at redemption rather than a theft, it is nearly always a region mismatch rather than a bad code — the redemption troubleshooting guide walks through the error messages brand by brand.

#Timing: buy the night before, not five minutes before

Delivery averages about 11 minutes, and that number is honest — but it is an average of a process with a variable step in it. Your payment has to confirm on-chain first, and confirmation time depends on the coin and on how busy the network is. Litecoin, Tron and Solana confirm in minutes. Monero wants ten confirmations, roughly twenty minutes. Bitcoin at a busy hour with a modest fee can take considerably longer than the average suggests.

There is also a countdown on the payment page: the quoted crypto amount is locked against a rate for a fixed window, and sending after it lapses puts the order into a state that needs sorting out rather than a code in an inbox. Crypto payment problems covers what each failure mode does and which are recoverable — but the simple version is: do not start a gift purchase in the taxi on the way to the party. Buy it the evening before, confirm the code arrived, and enjoy the dinner. If you are optimising purely for speed and predictability, USDT on TRC20 is the least dramatic option; the full ranking is in best coin to buy gift cards.

#How much to send

Every variant carries a $50 USD-equivalent floor, adapted to each currency — £40 in the UK, €50 in the Eurozone, ¥8,000 in Japan — with a $1,000 ceiling per order. That floor is an operator policy, not a suggestion, and it shapes gift-giving more than anything else on this page: there is no $10 stocking-filler here. If your budget is genuinely small, a mobile top-up starts at $20 and is a real gift in plenty of places — that is the mechanism explained in paying a phone bill with crypto.

Above the floor, pick the face value from the brand's own denomination list where one exists, because round denominations map to what the recipient will actually see. Discounts run up to 5% depending on brand and region, so the card frequently costs you slightly less than its face value — a small, quiet bonus that goes to the giver rather than the recipient.

For experience cards specifically, the tier matters more than the number. A €50 Tinggly opens a genuinely different catalogue than a €200 one, and because Tinggly is one-shot, a thin tier means a thin choice. If you are buying an experience as the gift rather than a token, spend at the level of the experience you would want to be given.

#What the recipient can see — and what they cannot

Nothing in what they receive says "crypto". The code is a code — the same string the brand would have issued had you paid with a card in a supermarket. There is no invoice attached to it, no wallet address, no transaction hash, no purchase price, and nothing that identifies you unless you choose to say so.

That cuts both ways and is worth being deliberate about. If the point is a discreet gift — to someone who would be uncomfortable receiving crypto, or in a situation where an obvious money transfer would be awkward — a gift card is about as unremarkable as value transfer gets. If instead you want credit for the gift, you have to supply it yourself: send the code with a message, because the email carrying it will not do it for you.

On our side, an email address is the only personal data involved and it is used once, to deliver the code. No account, no ID check, no marketing list. The honest limits of that privacy — what a chain analyst could still infer, what your own wallet history reveals — are laid out in how private are crypto gift cards, really. And if you are giving a card to someone specifically because you would rather they not see your wallet, remember the coin you pay with is visible to us and to the chain, not to them.

#The one card in the catalogue that expires

Nearly every balance we sell is permanent. Apple, Xbox, EA and the great majority of the catalogue carry no expiry and no dormancy fee in most markets, which is what makes a gift card a reasonable thing to give someone who may not spend it for a year.

Spotify is the exception, and it is the one to remember: the PIN expires 12 months after purchase, per Spotify's own card terms. It is also Premium Individual only — never Student, Duo or Family — so a Spotify card given to someone on a family plan is a card they cannot use. Both facts are easy to check and expensive to discover late.

The experience cards sit in between: 4 years for Tinggly, 24 to 36 months for ActivityGIFT and BucketListGift depending on the variant. Long, but not infinite. If the gift is a "someday" gift, say so when you hand it over and mention the date.

#A five-minute checklist

1. Decide whether you know their country. If not, restrict yourself to the 21 globally-redeemable brands — and start with the experience cards.
2. Pick the variant by storefront, not by residence. For region-locked brands this is the whole ball game.
3. Check expiry if it is a "someday" gift. Only Spotify has a hard 12-month clock, but experience vouchers have real end dates too.
4. Choose the inbox deliberately. Yours for a reveal, theirs for the shortest path — and read the address twice either way.
5. Buy the night before. Eleven minutes is an average, not a guarantee, and the rate quote has a countdown on it.
6. Hand the code over privately, and tell them to redeem it now. Once it is on their account it is theirs; until then it belongs to whoever reads it.

#Questions people ask

#Can I have the code sent directly to the person I am giving it to?

Yes. The delivery-email field at checkout takes any address — type theirs and the code goes straight to them, roughly 11 minutes after your payment confirms. You will not see the code yourself, so double-check the address before submitting. Keep the order number: order lookup needs the order number plus that same delivery email.

#Can I schedule the gift for a specific date?

No. There is no scheduled-send feature — the code is emailed as soon as the payment confirms on-chain. If the timing matters, send the code to your own inbox and forward it when you want it to land.

#Can I add a message or gift wrapping?

No. What we deliver is the code as plain text, with no message field and no decorative certificate. If the presentation matters, buy to your own address and put the code into your own card, message or envelope.

#What if I do not know which country they will redeem it in?

Choose from the 21 brands that redeem globally, listed in the table above. The three experience cards — Tinggly, ActivityGIFT and BucketListGift — are the most broadly appealing of them, because the recipient chooses the country, the activity and the date after they receive the code.

#Is the gift traceable back to me?

Not from the code. It carries no purchase price, no wallet address and no buyer identity — it is indistinguishable from a card bought with cash. If you want the recipient to know it came from you, tell them; nothing in the delivery does it for you.

#What happens if the recipient loses the code?

If they have not redeemed it, the value is still on the code and the email it arrived in is the copy of record — the order can be pulled back up at order lookup with the order number and delivery email. If someone else redeemed it, the balance has moved to that person's account and it is gone; a code is a bearer instrument, which is precisely why the handover deserves care.

#Can two people club together on one gift?

On ActivityGIFT and BucketListGift, yes — those behave like store credit, so two codes stack on a single booking. Tinggly does not: it is one voucher for one experience, so a joint gift means one person buying at a higher tier. For everything else, check whether the brand allows multiple codes on one order; most large retailers do.

#Which card should I buy if I genuinely have no idea what they like?

An experience card, and specifically ActivityGIFT if you want maximum flexibility — the balance splits, the catalogue spans everything from a spa afternoon to a cooking class, and the recipient picks the city. If the person is a known quantity in one domain, a targeted card is a better gift than a general one; our ranked pick of the catalogue sorts all 81 brands by how usable they actually are.