Uphold Review
In the world of cryptocurrency, things are moving at warp speed. There are endless options in the types of currency you can get your hands on, and each one holds the possibility of being the next big crypto coin that brings massive profit and value to its investors.
Profit-making opportunities happen every day for those that can move with the market at a moment's notice. Crypto, by its design, is decentralized, and there is not a single exchange that houses every single coin you might be seeking. There is no way to acquire, hold or convert all your crypto using a single service.
Your investment arsenal will need to have several crypto wallets, exchanges, and automated market makers (AMM) if you intend to have the mobility, versatility, and speed to be profitable. This review is of Uphold, an automated market maker service, to see if it is worth including in your toolkit.
Why Use an Automated Market Maker (AMM)?
To make an educated decision on Uphold, you have to first understand why AMM's are essential. If you are familiar with this, you can skip to the next section.
Using a traditional exchange to make changes from one cryptocurrency to another is incomplete and slow. This occurs for two reasons. First, the crypto you want to get may not be supported by the exchange, and second, it's slow, inefficient, and often expensive.
Using a traditional exchange looks like this:
1. Make the assets you want to convert available for trading
2. Go to the trading screen
3. Select the price and amount you want to sell.
4. Wait for the trade to be made.
5. If your target coin isn't paired to the currency you sold your assets into, you will need to do steps two through four again.
6. Once you have your currency in a compatible pairing, you can do steps two through four again.
7. You have now converted your cryptocurrency to another cryptocurrency.
Imagine a service that accomplishes those steps for you, with only the tap of a few buttons. AMM's automate the monotonous, time-consuming work for you so that you can seize on opportunities.
But this isn't the only benefit. Automated market makers also allow you to convert currency at the lowest possible transaction fees. Crypto investors lose hundreds and thousands of dollars per year on transaction or "gas" fees alone.
For example, if you were to buy $AMP using Ethereum, you would spend a minimum of twenty-two USD on gas fees. That means to purchase a five-cent $AMP coin, you would have to pay four hundred and forty times that amount to get the process started, regardless of how much or how little you bought.
However, with the help of an AMM, you could convert your Ethereum into Binance Smart Chain, making your cost only a couple of dollars. With the help of an AMM, this would only take you a few minutes, rather than over 30 steps doing it with a traditional exchange.
Uphold is one such automated market maker that seeks to help save you time and money.
Uphold the Company
Founded in 2013, Uphold is more established than the majority of the exchanges out there. Their premise is simple; to turn anything into anything.
What makes them so different is that they do not deal with cryptocurrency exclusively. You can swap cryptos into other cryptos, cryptos into over twenty different fiat currencies, and even into things like gold, silver, and carbon emissions tokens. They are seeking to give you supreme flexibility when it comes to your investments.
Account Setup
Uphold has one of the most straightforward signup processes in the industry. You can do it on a web browser or through the mobile application. Of the two, doing it from the web browser was the easiest.
Identity verification happened in minutes as opposed to days on some other exchanges.
Funding Your Account
For US-based users, funding your account can be the seventh circle of hell. Many exchanges don't allow you to use fiat currency which means purchasing elsewhere and sending it into the exchange. Uphold lets you use fiat currency inside their ecosystem.
Most AMM's require a third-party wallet to use their service and to fund transactions. Uphold has a wallet built into their platform and allows you to connect your bank account and initiate transactions without leaving their ecosystem.
Once you've connected your bank account, you can use it as a direct funding source on the trading screen. On top of that, those funds can be used immediately.
If you have crypto in other wallets, you can also send it straight into the Uphold wallet for use.
Open Uphold Account
Open Uphold Account
User Interface & Navigation
Both the web-based and mobile application are easy to navigate and use. One thing to note, when using the mobile app, it does feel like a previous generation when compared to the web-based platform. The mobile app allows you to trade and see your account balances but does little else. The bottom line, it does what you need when you need it without the bells and whistles.
The web-based interface is clean and easy to get around. You can track the current price of your favorite currencies, view your wallet balances, and trade, all without leaving the member dashboard.
Tools and Research
Most AMM's are not built for heavy research, and Uphold is no different. You can easily see a list of cryptos and other assets available and click into them to see a simple chart with highs and lows. A few AMM's provide a link for in-depth tools on Coin Market Cap. Uphold does not link to more robust research tools, which means you'll need to head over there independently.
Trading Digital Currency on Uphold
More pairings equal more flexibility. With over 43 pairings, Uphold has more than nearly 90% of AMM's on the market. What made the trading screen so fun to use is that you select your funds to convert and what you want to turn it into in dropdown menus rather than scrolling through an endless list of crypto pairings.
Right before your eyes, Uphold will calculate how much of the new currency you will get. You quickly see what the rate is, what the transaction fee will be and what you will end up with at the end. If it looks good, you hit the transact button and within seconds what would have taken 3-5 minutes and around twenty steps to do are magically done for you.
Trading Your Crypto with Other Assets
It can't be stressed enough how huge a deal this one feature of Uphold is for investors with diversified portfolios. Uphold gives investors the ability to trade between crypto currency and national currencies, precious metals, and utility tokens.
This gives the user the ability to quickly re-balance their portfolio into different asset classes with a few clicks of the button. In essence, this marries together forex, crypto, and precious metals investment into one single application.
Ease of Use & Dependability
The concept of swapping crypto takes some getting used to, but once you have that mastered, the Uphold platform is straightforward and efficient to use. Because it is not considered one of the major players yet, Uphold managed to stay up and open for business during the most recent massive crypto events with no downtime.
For example, in March of 2024, when several large exchanges blocked people's ability to purchase $DOGE for several hours, Uphold remained open for business and users, including this writer was able to get as much $DOGE as they wanted.
Uphold's customer support is very accessible and ready to help fix any issues you may have.
Tip
If you submit a support ticket to customer care, be sure to hit them up on Twitter right after. Their social media team will nudge their support team to expedite your request.
Uphold Fees
Uphold is very upfront about their fees. Not only is there an entire page on their website to the topic, but you can see what the fee for your trade will be before you initiate it. When it comes to their crypto transaction fees, they are on par with other services.
The fees to trade between asset classes (precious metals, national currencies) are very reasonable. They boast some of the lowest FOREX rates in the industry.
Open Uphold Account
Open Uphold Account
Uphold Tools For Crypto Investment
Uphold has been making significant efforts to do more than simply swap your currency and find ways to grow your crypto investment. Below are some of the most helpful ones.
Recurring Investment
Seasoned crypto investors know that the top way to maximize their returns is to implement the strategy of dollar-cost averaging (DCA). Uphold allows you to set up a recurring investment however often and for how ever much you would like for any of their cryptos, national currency, precious metals, and utility tokens. In the case of this writer, he was able to save 30% more than anticipated using this feature alone.
Automated Trading
This tool is pretty new to their arsenal but is very handy if you want to set automatic buy or sell orders when specific cryptos hit various price targets.
Rewards Debit Card
This is an easy way to pay with your crypto or other supported assets at major retailers, just like you usually would with a regular credit or debit card. In addition to its ease of use when purchasing, Uphold offers 1% cash-back and 2% crypto-back, which is a neat way to grow your holdings.
After months of use, Uphold has proven to be a valuable tool in this writer's crypto arsenal. The intuitive layout, ease of use, and competitive fees make using it a pleasure. The game-changer features such as direct ACH connection to your bank, using fiat currency to purchase crypto, and the ability to invest across asset classes takes it from the level of extraordinary to legendary. With that said, an area of improvement would be to support even more crypto coins than it presently does. Uphold delivers on what it promises and has tremendous potential to continue to wow users well into the future.
Open Uphold Account
Open Uphold Account
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