Uphold Crypto: What You Need to Know

Updated on April 9, 2024
At a Glance: Uphold is a comprehensive financial platform that allows users to buy and transact in various asset classes, including national currencies, cryptocurrencies, stocks, and precious metals. With a global reach and frictionless foreign exchange, Uphold offers a wide range of possibilities and boasts a 100% reserve model for secure investments. It leverages blockchain technology and provides automated trading, multi-asset capabilities, and unique “anything to anything” trading. While it offers numerous advantages, Uphold is still a relatively new entrant and consolidates all investments in one interface, potentially posing security risks.

The crypto craze is higher than ever these days and is showing no signs of slowing down. Many users look for great crypto exchanges for convenient payments and transactions. Uphold is one such app with much to offer its users. It promises to be a game-changer in the already changed field. In this article, we will explore Uphold in detail and discuss how you can make the most out of it.

What Is Uphold?

“Anything to Anything” seems to be the saying at the headquarters of Uphold because they promise to allow you to buy everything from 27 national currencies, 65 cryptocurrencies and utility tokens, over 50 U.S. stocks, and even up to 4 precious metals all in one place!

Uphold is a financial platform that can be used to purchase and transact in various asset classes and currencies, both fiat and crypto, all in one place. The company prides itself on being the best in its field in providing such a wide range of possibilities to its users.

Starting as early as 2015, the company grew to serve more than 184 of 195 countries worldwide in just over five years! It works in more than 80 currencies worldwide, both fiat and crypto combined, and has a frictionless foreign exchange policy that is consumer-centric. It helps you save the most on exchange rates and transaction costs.

In just these few years, the company claims to have made transactions that are upwards of US$4 billion and counting. It is truly a multi-asset digital money platform that is squeezing the financial world, one transaction at a time. Uphold is built at the core of proprietary technologies and e-money apps and ensures safe, transparent, fair, and affordable financial services.

How Uphold Works

Uphold is a one-of-a-kind platform and hence, has a unique work-frame. Uphold works by leveraging blockchain technology and provides easy access to cryptocurrencies, national currencies, precious metals, credit products. It is on its way to releasing crypto-backed debit cards as well. Uphold charges zero commissions on all its trades and allows you to send money to virtually anyone as long as they have an active bank account.

It creates an easy and intuitive trading experience with its unique financial network translations that can be applied to all asset classes and recorded in one digital language. Thus, they eliminate most of the red tape and work typically required when buying or selling any asset class, fiat or cryptocurrency, and precious metals.

The company has a working model of having a 100% reserve instead of the traditional fractional reserve model often used by banks. This means all your investments and currencies are backed with 100% storage. This reduces the risk of losing your assets at any time. This structure is published on the company’s transparency page and is updated in real-time. They record all transactions immediately, immutably, and anonymously to safeguard your investments and are visible on their reserve ledger.

Uphold Key Features And Services

Some of the unique services of Uphold are:

Automated Trading

Just like premium trading platforms, Uphold, too, allows you to easily place buy/sell orders on all your favorite stocks, currencies, and other commodities at any time you like. You can easily schedule all orders using autopilot and reduce price volatility.

Multi-Asset Platform

Unlike most trading platforms, Uphold is actually a multi-asset platform that allows you to buy/sell multiple assets like U.S. stocks, fiat and cryptocurrencies, and precious metals all in one place. The app serves the purpose of more than one trading and financing apps on the go.

Anything To Anything Capability

Uphold has a unique trading capability that lets you trade from anything to anything quite literally. You can buy any asset in the so many currencies supported by the company and sell it in any other class. For example, you can buy bitcoin with U.S. dollars and sell it for purchases in gold or other metals.

Debit Card

Now, if you’re living in the United States of America, you can sign up for an Uphold card backed up by cryptocurrencies, gold, and more. That means you can pay businesses with your gold holding and crypto holdings in real-time! This card can also give you a 1% cashback bonus and a 2% crypto reward.

Uphold offers a lot many financial services as well.

Cheap Forex

Uphold boasts of some of the most affordable forex rates across its services, starting from just 0.2% on all major currencies worldwide.

Instant Remittance

You can send money to your friends and family at any time on a hassle freeway. The process is free and instantaneous and can be transferred in anything from USD to bitcoin as well.

Flexible Payments

You can also be paid in any currency you like from your employer or even a combination of currencies such as bitcoin, dollar, pounds, etc.

Blockchain Integration

This integration allows its customers to easily withdraw their funds directly to their bank accounts in over 36 countries or even to private crypto wallets on seven crypto networks instantly and free of any fee levied.

Pros And Cons Of Uphold

As idealistic as it may sound, everything great comes with a few limitations. The pros and cons of Uphold are:

Pros Of Uphold

  • Several features: Unlike several other apps, Uphold gives you the advantage of having multiple features all in one place and makes your process seamless and easy.
  • Low transaction fees: Uphold imposes low transaction fees and other charges you might expect. This has historically been a great plus point in welcoming new customers.
  • Secured deposits: Uphold guarantees a 100% deposit and does not follow the bank policy of supporting only fractional deposits.

Cons Of Uphold

  • New entrant: Despite its success, Uphold is still a relatively new company and is running hot on high motivation. It is still too early if the same quality will be maintained throughout the years.
  • It is one place: All your investments are locked in just one interface and application. This could become an issue if there are security lapses.

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Final Thoughts

Thus, Uphold is, so far, an excellent place for your new investments and transactions. They have gained much in less time and have been able to update themselves with the changing times. However, it is still yet to be seen how they would go into the future. The company gives premium services for the price of pennies and ensures customer satisfaction to the fullest. Check out its app today.

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Frank Gogol

I’m a firm believer that information is the key to financial freedom. On the Stilt Blog, I write about the complex topics — like finance, immigration, and technology — to help immigrants make the most of their lives in the U.S. Our content and brand have been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and more.

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