Uphold

Uphold is a brokerage-style app rather than an order-book exchange. A customer holds balances in many assets at once and converts between any two of them at a price Uphold quotes, which can be crypto to crypto, crypto to dollars, or dollars to gold. It holds those balances for the customer, so it is a custodial service. A separate product, Uphold Vault, lets users keep coins in a multi-signature wallet where they hold two of the three keys.

The company launched in 2014 as Bitreserve, founded by CNET founder Halsey Minor, according to CoinDesk, and changed its name to Uphold in October 2015, as Fortune reported at the time. Uphold's legal disclosures name Uphold Ltd. as the parent of its regional companies. It is privately held and publishes no accounts. Simon McLoughlin speaks for it as chief executive in its 2026 response to New York regulators, according to The Block.

Uphold has no token of its own. The card pays rewards in XRP, and the app supports staking and a few on-chain products, but none depend on an Uphold coin.

The entity behind an account depends on where the customer lives, and each one is licensed or registered only in its own jurisdiction. Uphold's important disclosures page lists them as follows.

• United States: Uphold HQ Inc. (NMLS 1269875), registered with FinCEN as a money services business and holding money transmitter licences in 43 states, DC and Puerto Rico. Alaska is limited to fiat, Tennessee's licence does not cover virtual currency, and a California Digital Financial Assets Law application is pending. Equities run through Uphold Securities Inc., an SEC- and FINRA-registered broker-dealer, with Apex Clearing as custodian.
• United Kingdom: Uphold Europe Limited, an agent of the e-money institution Optimus Cards UK Ltd. That is a distribution arrangement under another firm's FCA permission, not Uphold's own authorization.
• European Union: Uphold Digital Assets Europe, a Braga company registered with Banco de Portugal as a virtual asset service provider. Its MiCA application is still under review.
• Elsewhere: Uphold Worldwide Ltd., registered with the Securities Commission of The Bahamas as a digital asset business.
• Canada: Uphold withdrew its registration application in some provinces and no longer offers registrable services to Canadian residents.

Uphold's main charge is the spread, the gap between the price it quotes and the market price it pays to source the asset. It is folded into the quote, so it never appears as a separate line. When a trade crosses two asset types, the higher spread applies, and spreads can widen in volatile markets; the app shows a notice when they pass 4%. The figures below are from Uphold's service fees page, last updated 21 September 2026, and its fees and limits help article, checked in October 2026.

The spread matters more than any line in that table. On a $1,000 bitcoin purchase, a 2.1% spread costs about $21, and selling later costs a similar amount again. Our guide to how to buy bitcoin without overpaying covers how to compare a quoted price with the market.

The Uphold card is a Visa debit card that spends from whatever balance the customer chooses in the app, converting it to dollars at the point of sale. It is open only to residents of US states and Washington, DC, and excludes Louisiana, New York and US territories. There is no credit check; the customer needs a verified Uphold account and the mobile app, where the card is ordered and managed.

There are two tiers, according to Uphold's card page in October 2026. Essential has no annual fee and pays 2% back in XRP on purchases from any funding source, up to $120; a footnote says that reward value runs for three months after activation for cards activated from 1 January 2026. Elite costs $99.99 a year, pays 4% in XRP on purchases funded with crypto or metals and 3% on fiat or stablecoin purchases, up to $300 a month, and comes as a metal card. Essential charges $2.95 per ATM withdrawal and a 1.5% foreign transaction fee; Elite charges neither.

A card purchase funded from crypto is a sale of that crypto at Uphold's quoted price, so the spread from the table above applies on top of any reward. Uphold's site does not name the bank that issues the card; it says US dollar balances are held at Cross River Bank, Member FDIC. For a side-by-side look at other cards, see how the Uphold card compares with other crypto cards, and for the arithmetic see the real cost of a crypto card.

Uphold says it serves customers worldwide with a few exceptions, but its location list is long. As of 16 October 2026 its help center names some 30 places where it offers no service, including New York, Canada, Russia, Iran and North Korea. A second, longer list covers countries and states where new accounts cannot be opened, among them Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Brazil, India, Japan, Mexico and most EU member states, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

New York is handled by location rather than address. Someone physically in the state can still log in, sell crypto for fiat, trade equities and use the card for fiat-funded purchases, but other crypto services are blocked until the device registers outside New York.

In the EU, customers of Uphold Digital Assets Europe have been unable to deposit or receive crypto or fiat since 1 July 2026, the date Uphold gives for MiCA taking full effect, because its application had not been decided. They can hold and withdraw. Uphold describes the pause as temporary and has not given an end date.

Uphold is a licensed money transmitter in most US states and a registered firm in the UK, Portugal and the Bahamas, so it is a real, supervised business. Being regulated does not make a custodial balance risk-free, and three points matter.

First, crypto balances are not insured by the FDIC, SIPC or any other government scheme, as Uphold's disclosures say plainly. Only US dollars in the Fiat Asset Account sit at Cross River Bank with FDIC coverage up to $250,000. Uphold says it or its affiliates may carry private insurance against theft or loss of digital assets but publishes no limits.

Second, Uphold's transparency page says the platform is "always 100%+ reserved" and publishes assets and liabilities in real time, with a per-tier view behind a login. It names no auditor or attestation firm for those figures. A self-published reserve number is a company claim, which our guide to spotting a weak proof of reserves explains how to test. Uphold also says it does not lend out customer funds unless the customer opts into staking or DeFi lending, and that it holds SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications, which cover information security rather than solvency.

Third, there is a regulatory record. In March 2023 Uphold paid $72,230 to OFAC over 152 transactions with people in Iran, Cuba and Venezuela between 2017 and 2022, which it had disclosed itself. In April 2026 it agreed with the New York Attorney General to pay more than $5 million to customers who lost money in CredEarn, a yield product from the lender Cred that Uphold promoted from 2019 to 2020 as a safe savings product before Cred went bankrupt. Uphold disputed the characterization, according to The Block, saying US prosecutors had identified it as a victim of Cred's fraud. California residents get an extra protection: assets Uphold holds for them are held in trust under state law and are not Uphold's property.

Money leaves Uphold either as fiat to a bank or card, or as crypto to an outside wallet. US customers can send dollars by standard ACH at no fee, arriving within one to five business days depending on how the bank was linked, or pay 1.75% (minimum $1) for an instant withdrawal to a bank or eligible debit card. US withdrawal limits run up to $25,000 a day and $700,000 a month. ACH deposits can be traded straight away but must settle before they can be withdrawn, which explains many "withdrawal pending" complaints.

To move crypto out, the customer picks Withdraw, chooses the network and pastes the destination address. Uphold charges the network fee plus $0.99 on every network except Bitcoin, XRP Ledger and Hedera. Choosing the wrong network for the receiving wallet is the usual way funds get lost. Moving coins to a wallet the customer controls removes the custodial risk described above; our guide on how to move crypto off an exchange covers the steps.

Uphold support is ticket-based. Customers open a ticket in the app under Help, then My Tickets, or through web forms on support.uphold.com, which work without logging in. Uphold says it answers within 24 hours and usually within 12. The only phone line it publishes is for California residents: +1 (888) 831-1780, weekdays 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time. Anyone who suspects a hacked account can freeze it from the app's security settings.

Searches for an Uphold support phone number turn up many numbers posted on unrelated sites. Uphold does not publish them, and its help center warns that it will never call to ask a customer to move funds or to read out a two-factor code. Treat any inbound call, text or chat window claiming to be Uphold support as a likely scam.

Uphold's history runs from a bitcoin storage start-up to a multi-asset app, with a growing list of regulatory obligations.

• 2014: launches as Bitreserve, founded by Halsey Minor.
• October 2015: renamed Uphold and moves away from a bitcoin-only identity.
• January 2019 to October 2020: offers Cred's CredEarn yield product; Cred files for bankruptcy in November 2020.
• March 2023: $72,230 OFAC sanctions settlement.
• April 2026: New York Attorney General settlement over CredEarn; Uphold agrees to register as a broker with the state's Attorney General.
• 1 July 2026: EU deposits paused as MiCA takes full effect with Uphold's application still pending.