Uphold, a cloud-based financial services platform, has partnered with leading cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex, allowing real-time market pricing for its members to exchange Voxel, Litecoin and Ethereum into a wide range of fiat currencies, including the US dollar, Euro, Chinese yuan, Indian rupee, Japanese yen and British pound, as well as precious metals, including gold and silver.
Jorge Pereira, Executive Vice President, Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Uphold, has announced in March that they were going to to launch Litecoin and Ethereum in April and May 2016, respectively.
“We are proud to provide the widest array of options to buy, hold, trade and convert seamlessly among multiple asset classes and soon these additional cryptocurrencies,” said Anthony Watson, President and CEO of Uphold.
As a result of this integration, Uphold users will be able to trade with no fees, up to $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year).
Uphold clarifies that it is separate from Voxelus and has made no investments in the latter. In fact, Uphold was the first company to partner with Voxelus in the creation of their cryptocurrency – The Voxel (VOX) – and has developed the VOX digital wallet and other back-end financial integrations to power the Voxelus Marketplace. In return, Uphold took a percentage of the Voxelus pre-mined float.
Voxelus Marketplace is the largest repository for Virtual Reality (VR) content in the world, which is currently live for free products and will go live for paid transactions on April 20.
Voxel crowdsale took place last year and raised $500,000 to help build the marketplace. Both Voxelus and Uphold agreed that neither would ever sell its owned coins at a price below the final crowdsale price of 0.001536 BTC (currently about 64 cents). Currently, all Voxel trades on Uphold currently go through Bittrex (other exchanges could be added in the future).
“We are a highly regulated institution,” said Watson, “and we have to play by certain rules. We have stated, and we reiterate today, that neither Uphold nor Voxelus will sell any Voxels it owns – which constitute the vast majority of Voxels in existence - at below the final crowdsale price of 1/650 BTC – ever. Uphold has not sold any Voxels whatsoever, even when the Voxel initially traded well above the crowdsale price, and we have no intention of selling any Voxels for the foreseeable future. We believe in and support the long-term vision of Voxelus, its unique and compelling VR content creation platform and their cryptocurrency the Voxel. We strongly believe the VOX is significantly undervalued and believe others will see why when Voxelus fully launches their marketplace in the next few weeks. We’re very excited about the whole project.”
The news follows Uphold’s recent partnerships with two major banks in India – IDFC Bank and YES BANK – which will allow it to bring the benefits of cloud money, including free foreign exchange and almost instant access to funds, to the world's largest remittance-receiving country.
