Uphold Review: Pros and Cons of This Intuitive Crypto Exchange

Uphold is an intuitive crypto exchange and digital wallet for trading and securing cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, foreign fiat currencies, utility tokens, and precious metals.

Uphold is an intuitive crypto exchange and digital wallet for trading and securing cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, foreign fiat currencies, utility tokens, and precious metals.

Business Insider's personal finance team compared Uphold to the best cryptocurrency exchanges and found it stands out for its ease of use, transparent fee structure, and asset-to-asset swaps.

Uphold is good for crypto traders interested in discovering emerging coins and tokens and asset-to-asset trading. Compared to other exchanges, however, Uphold lacks advanced charting features and charges high fees.

Coinbase is one of the best investment platforms for crypto trading, staking rewards, and crypto storage. The crypto exchange offering nearly 250 coins and tokens and is great for active real investors who can utilize Coinbase's services, account options, and investment tools.

Uphold Overview

Uphold is a crypto trading platform for diversifying your investment portfolio with popular and emerging cryptocurrencies. It is especially good for investors looking for early access to less popular coins. Uphold offers individual, institutional, and enterprise crypto services.

With Uphold, you can invest in environmental assets, including UPCO2, the world's first tradeable carbon credit token. You can also buy gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and over 20 kinds of fiat money.

Novice crypto traders can benefit from Uphold's comprehensive learning hub, fee transparency, and easy onboarding process. More experienced traders can still access advanced order types, including limit orders, take-profit orders, and trailing stop orders. However, charting features are limited compared to competitors.

Uphold's main perk is its cross-asset trading feature, which allows users to trade directly between different asset classes. For example, you could directly exchange your bitcoin assets for gold without converting to cash.

US investors now have access to staking on Uphold again. Investors can stake up to 19 on-chain assets (including ether, Cardano, Tezos, and Solana) for weekly rewards of the same-staked cryptocurrency.

One downside of Uphold is that its variable spread fee structure can be costly, especially for low-liquid cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin.

Uphold provides a detailed customer support center with FAQs on various topics and a support request form. The Uphold mobile app has a chat function.

Uphold has a rating of 4.7/5 on the Apple Store and a 4.5/5 on Google Play.

Ways to Invest with Uphold

Uphold's setup process is fairly straightforward and designed to be completed in about five minutes. Like most crypto exchanges, you must enter a valid email and password. Uphold also requires you to provide a government-issued ID and selfie certification. Because of the selfie requirement, opening an Uphold account is easiest on mobile.

Uphold Personal Crypto Trading Account

A Personal Crypto Trading Account through Uphold provides retail traders access to features like automatic recurring trades, built-in wallet storage, and limited stop orders. You can also access fast deposits and 0% deposit fees and withdrawal fees.

Your Uphold multi-panel dashboard helps you navigate your account balance, crypto watchlist, recent transactions, Vault, USD Interest Account, and staking features. The Uphold mobile app displays dashboard panels one at a time but otherwise appears the same as the Uphold web platform.

The take-profit feature allows you to automatically sell assets when the price increases by the profit percentage you choose. Similarly, the trailing stop-loss feature helps limit potential losses by automatically selling a security when it hits the predetermined stop price.

Another perk of Uphold is its AutoPilot option, which utilizes dollar-cost averaging to lessen volatility for crypto trading. Investors can also benefit from automatic recurring trades and Uphold's DCA calculator.

Uphold's charting capabilities are limited to price tracking. You can view an asset's market cap, 24-hour trading volume, and all-time high price. Sophisticated traders who like analyzing trade fluctuations to identify trends and trading opportunities probably won't find Uphold to be a good fit, as the exchange lacks charts like candlesticks, range trading, ascending triangles, and other technical indicators.

Uphold Staking

US investors can now stake with Uphold. Staking involves locking up your crypto assets for a set period of time in exchange for rewards. Staking is essential to the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

Uphold had previously offered staking services to retail investors but stopped when the SEC started enforcing regulatory actions for staking and claimed exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken were violating securities laws. In 2025, the SEC dropped most of its lawsuits, allowing crypto exchanges like Uphold to reopen staking services.

On Uphold, you can stake: Kusama, Cosmos, Casper,