Ripple, where Kidd worked as chief risk officer from 2013 to 2015, is a growing blockchain-based payments company that primarily works with banks. In addition to the reserves, 20% of Kidd's investment is a cash deal to fund Uphold Labs, a research facility that Kidd hopes will be as important to the future of cryptocurrency as the legendary Bell Labs was to telecommunications and computing.Īs part of Kidd's investment, Uphold Labs has a mandate for several projects, including platform integrations with the Ripple ecosystem, as well as GlobaliD - a universal digital identity and payments company, which Kidd runs as CEO. But if you're a smaller exchange, people are like, 'What kind of assurance do I have if something bad happens?'" Part of Uphold's mandate is to add XRP to its exchange "People just assume Coinbase has enough money and can withstand a hack. "It's to level the playing field," said Kidd. Kidd believes that guaranteeing users that they will get their money back, even in the case of a hack, could give Uphold a leg up on its competition, and prevent it from collapsing completely if things do go wrong. And a hack could put you out of business." "It's fine in normal day-to-day operations, but there are a lot of hacks. "As an ex-regulator, that seemed thin to me," Kidd said about Uphold's 1% reserves. While regulated institutions like banks are required to have some money on reserve, cryptocurrency exchanges aren't regulated in the same way. This will go up to 20% with the investment, the company said. Hack attacks on cryptocurrency companies has become increasingly commonplace, as many of these exchanges sit on millions of dollars in digital assets.Ĭurrently, Uphold only holds an extra 1% on top of its users' deposits in reserves, according to Kidd. The biggest part of Kidd's investment is an insurance fund for Uphold's users, which will be used to compensate users in the event of a successful cyberattack on the company. In a bigger-picture sense, Kidd's backing is all in the name of making Uphold more secure than smaller crypto-exchanges, while simultaneously positioning it as more innovative and experimental than the $1.6 billion leader of the pack Coinbase, which has been cautious about adding new cryptocurrencies to its exchange. The investment was made through his firm, Hard Yaka.Ī big part of where that funding will go: Adding support to Uphold for trading in XRP, the red-hot cryptocurrency from startup Ripple, making it one of the few mainstream currency exchanges to do so. Now Kidd, a federal regulator turned entrepreneur, has invested $57.5 million into Uphold, a four-year-old currency exchange where traders can convert USD into traditional currency like euros as easily as they can cryptocurrencies like the red-hot bitcoin. Before that, he was an early investor in Twitter and Square, before their respective IPOs. Greg Kidd has had big success with his early investment in Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange now valued at $1.6 billion. Uphold will also use the funds to add integrations with Ripple and begin trading in its cryptocurrency XRP, which is up almost 4000% since it started trading in April.Uphold will use part of the money as insurance for its users to guarantee that their deposits to the exchange are protected in the event of a hacking incident.Greg Kidd, an early investor in Coinbase and Twitter, just invested $57.5 million toward Uphold, a currency exchange that also trades in cryptocurrencies.Rather, it credits itself as being "the world’s first and only real-time transparent and fully verifiable reserve.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Originally named Bitreserve, the platform was rebranded as Uphold. Uphold is "a digital money platform offering financial services to a global market." It was founded in 2014 by Halsey Minor and officially launched the following year. Uphold requires personal details like your name, phone number, and date of birth to set up an account and additional information if you want to make trades.Among Uphold’s stated priorities are the reduction of transaction fees and the maintenance of high standards of transparency.Although it is commonly associated with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, Uphold is also used to trade traditional assets such as fiat currencies, gold, and certain equities.The company allows individuals to securely move, convert, hold and transact across various asset classes.Uphold is a cloud-based financial service platform.
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