Maintain, il wallet crypto with exchange integrated

Uphold is a crypto wallet that is widely used, especially by those who use Brave as their browser.

In fact, for many years Brave has partnered with Uphold by allowing users to transfer BAT rewards earned in the browser to the Uphold wallet.

In other words, BAT rewards are accumulated on the Brave Rewards wallet and from there they can be sent to the Uphold wallet where they can be converted into many other digital assets and currencies

The exchange

In fact, one of the special features of the Uphold crypto wallet is that it has a built-in exchange that allows different cryptocurrencies to be exchanged.

In fact, it is actually a full-fledged digital money platform, designed to provide convenient and secure access to both traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies and other investments. The platform has more than 10 million users and publishes data about its reserves updated in real time.

At its core is a crypto exchange and wallet, with more than 250 cryptocurrencies and tokens, but only three fiat currencies.

However, it is still a centralized exchange with a custodial wallet, so in this respect not particularly different from other crypto platforms.

It is based in Lithuania, where Uphold Lithuania UAB appears to be a legally registered financial company under license number 305967101.

The company

Uphold was founded in 2015, so it has been in the market for almost a decade now. Until the time of the beginning of the cooperation with Brave in 2019, it had collected about 1 million users, but perhaps because of this cooperation, it later grew to 10 million.

It was also reportedly the first financial trader in the world to link a debit card to the wallet to pay with cryptocurrencies in the wallet.

Trade

One of the special features of this platform concerns the trade itself.

On Uphold, it’s actually what’s known as all-to-all trading, which allows any asset to be traded directly into any other asset without having to make intermediate conversions. Since there are no commissions on exchanges, it can be especially useful because it makes trading easier and faster.

Although there are no commissions on stock exchanges, the company nevertheless adds a price spread, which means that purchases are actually made at a slightly higher price than the market price. The spread, and not commissions, is the company’s source of income.

It is worth noting that in addition to cryptocurrencies, it also allows trading in precious metals and currency, and has a programmable recursive buy and sell function that can be useful especially for those who do DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging).

The goal

As you can imagine, Uphold’s target audience is particularly small investors and retail speculators.

In fact, the platform is designed to be easy to use, versatile and low-cost, with generally quite basic functionality. For example, there is Limit Orders, but it does not offer the advanced functionality that professionals require.

On the other hand, the advantage is that it can offer a very user-friendly user interface, without complex graphs, tables of numbers and moving data.

Thus, it is also no coincidence that it was among the first to offer a Mastercard debit card that can be financed with cryptocurrency, since many users are actually individuals who use the wallet to quickly and easily make exchanges and payments.

Interesting, but it doesn’t seem to offer an excellent support service, despite the target audience actually demanding it.

Safety

One of the aspects that this platform seems to focus on the most is security. After all, the retail target is by far the most susceptible to theft or fraud, so in order to serve it, it is necessary to provide very high levels of security.

In particular, Uphold not only requires identity verification, but it imposes a very secure wallet login procedure, so much so that it is sometimes slow. The platform itself is fast, but logging in can be a bit laborious, especially for first-time users.

However, this serves to maintain a high level of security, which is very important since it is a custodial wallet.

Conclusions

For an apparently secure exchange, and certainly easy to use, it doesn’t seem to have very many users. Moreover, many of these are probably brave users who receive BAT rewards.

Furthermore, trading volumes are low, indicating limited use, or with little capital. Then again, the rewards in BAT that Brave doles out are definitely small.

The news regarding the development of the platform is also not much, perhaps because over time it has been overtaken by more aggressive competitors who have managed to absorb most of the customer base. Also, being based in Lithuania certainly doesn’t help the US market presence.

Since registration is free, there is no reason to discourage it, not least because registering at least gives you a chance to see the very simple user interface to see if it can be considered an advantage or not.