How to Set Up and Use Your WATS NFC Metal Card

The WATS NFC Metal Card is the physical, hardware part of the WATS wallet family — a brushed-metal card you tap against your phone to prove you are present before your wallet does anything sensitive. Setting it up is refreshingly low-stakes, and the reason is worth saying up front: the card is a tap-to-authenticate companion, not key storage. Your private keys never live on the card; they stay in the non-custodial WATS apps. So unlike pairing a hardware wallet that holds your seed, nothing here can go catastrophically wrong if you fumble a step. This guide walks you through ordering the card, pairing it with the WATS mobile app, and using it day to day — tapping to authenticate, tapping to sign, personalizing it, and recovering if you ever lose it.

Before you start: what you are actually setting up

WATS is a self-custody wallet that spans four products — a browser Hot Wallet, a Chrome extension, a mobile app, and this NFC Metal Card. Most wallets are software only; WATS is one of the few self-custody wallets that ships its own hardware. But the card plays a specific role. It adds a physical hardware factor on top of your biometric unlock: a tangible "yes, I am here" gesture for logging in and for approving transactions. It does not hold your keys, it is not a cold wallet, and it is not a payment card. That means the order of operations is simple: you set up your WATS wallet in the app first, then pair the card to it.

If you have used a Ledger or a Tangem card, reset your expectations here. Those devices store keys. The WATS card authenticates you to keys that live in the WATS apps. It is closer to a physical security key for a login than to a vault.

Step 1 — Order your card

Order the card from the official WATS store at store.watswallet.com. You choose between two materials that behave identically and differ only in feel: a brushed stainless-steel version at around 22 g that lands in your hand like a premium object, and a polycarbonate version at around 5 g for people who would rather carry something barely-there. Both run the same NTAG 216 chip and the same tap behaviour. While ordering you can add an optional UV custom print (600 DPI, CMYK) of your own logo, artwork or photo. Buy only from the official store domain — type it yourself rather than following links from ads or messages.

Step 2 — Install the WATS app and set up your wallet

Because the card pairs to a wallet rather than carrying one, you need the WATS wallet itself first. Head to the download page, which detects your device and sends you to the App Store or Google Play, and install the WATS mobile app. Create or import your wallet there, and — this is the important habit — back up your recovery phrase offline and never type it anywhere you did not initiate yourself. The card will sit on top of this wallet as an extra factor; it does not replace your seed-phrase backup, and it never will.

Step 3 — Pair the card with the WATS mobile app

With your wallet set up and your phone's NFC enabled, open the WATS mobile app and start the card-pairing flow. Hold the card flat against the back of your phone, near the NFC antenna, and keep it still for a moment. Under the hood, the phone's reader and the card's NTAG 216 chip complete a short contactless handshake over ISO/IEC 14443 at 13.56 MHz, secured with AES-128 so the exchange cannot be trivially replayed by an eavesdropper. The app links the card to your wallet as a recognised companion. The exact taps and confirmations can change as the app evolves, so follow the in-app prompts as the source of truth.

Step 4 — Tap to authenticate

Day to day, the first thing the card does is authenticate access. When you open the wallet or perform a protected action, the app asks for the card: you tap it to the phone, the handshake completes, and that physical presence becomes a confirmation layered on top of your Face ID or fingerprint. The point is that biometric unlock proves it is you on the device, and the card tap proves you physically hold the companion — two different factors that an attacker would have to defeat together rather than one at a time.

Step 5 — Tap to sign a transaction

The second job is signing. When you send, swap or approve something, you initiate it inside the app as usual, and then tap the card to add a hardware confirmation step before it goes through. This is "tap-to-sign": the action is something you already started, and the tap is the deliberate physical "yes" that releases it. And because the WATS Hot Wallet — like every WATS product — is fully non-custodial, you hold your own keys and your own seed phrase and WATS never holds a key; the card tap simply adds a hardware factor on top of the key you already control, so a stolen phone still cannot approve on its own.

Personalize it (optional)

If you skipped it at checkout, the card supports an optional UV print at 600 DPI in CMYK, so you can put a logo, a piece of artwork or a photo on the steel or polycarbonate face. It is cosmetic — it changes nothing about how the authentication works — but it makes the card unmistakably yours.

If you lose the card

Here is the calm part, and it is calm by design. Losing the card is an inconvenience, not a crisis, precisely because the card was never your keys.

1. Nobody can drain your wallet with a found card. It cannot sign on its own, it is not a standalone cold wallet, and it stores no private keys — your keys stay with you in the non-custodial WATS apps. In isolation it is an inert piece of metal.
2. Keep using the WATS app. Your access does not depend on the physical card — you can send, receive, swap and manage your wallet through the mobile app and Chrome extension exactly as before.
3. Order a replacement from store.watswallet.com and pair it as a new companion to your existing wallet.
4. Follow the official WATS docs for the exact steps to re-pair a replacement and revoke the old card — treat the security page and the WATS documentation, not this article, as the authoritative source for the current flow.

Where to go next

For the product-level overview — materials, finishes and how to buy — see the WATS NFC Metal Card page. To understand the chip, the durability ratings and the threat model in depth, read WATS NFC Metal Card security, explained. And if you are still deciding whether a tap-to-authenticate companion is what you want versus a key-storage cold card, Best Web3 wallets with an NFC metal card lays the two philosophies side by side.