Your Uphold Account Is Safe, But the Company Just Cut 17% of Its Staff
Uphold laid off 85 workers as retail crypto trading slows, betting instead on banks and fintechs using its platform.
If you keep coins on Uphold, nothing changes for you today — but the company behind your account just got noticeably smaller. Uphold has cut roughly 17% of its global workforce, around 85 people including permanent staff and contractors, as it leans harder into serving banks and fintechs rather than everyday traders.
Why your coins are still fine
Uphold was quick to stress that this isn’t a shutdown. No offices are closing, and customers in the UK, Europe and on the enterprise side should notice zero disruption. This is a staffing reshuffle, not a platform wind-down — think of it as the company trimming one part of the business to feed another that’s growing faster.
CEO Simon McLoughlin framed it as a recalibration after years of rapid expansion. “We’re recalibrating after several years of extraordinary growth, during which we nearly doubled our headcount,” he said, adding: “Despite the current slowdown in crypto trading activity, we’ve never been more confident in the prospects for digital assets and blockchain technology.”
The retail slowdown behind the decision
Founded in New York in 2015, Uphold built its name letting everyday people buy, sell and hold crypto, cash, stocks and precious metals from one account. But like much of the industry, it’s feeling a broader chill: the total crypto market cap slid to around $2.1 trillion by the end of the second quarter after three straight quarters of declines, with trading volumes and retail participation both softening under higher interest rates and lingering geopolitical uncertainty.
US spot bitcoin ETFs bled a combined $6.9 billion in net outflows across May and June. July has brought some relief, including a six-day run of inflows, but the recovery is still modest next to the money that walked out the door earlier in the year. For a platform whose consumer business depends on people actively trading, that kind of pullback in appetite matters a lot.
Betting big on banks instead of traders
Where retail has cooled, Uphold says its enterprise side is heating up. That business lets banks, fintechs and broker-dealers plug crypto trading and custody straight into their own apps, rather than sending customers to a separate exchange. Uphold says demand there is accelerating fast enough to justify shifting people and budget toward it, with more growth announcements promised in the coming months.
That doesn’t mean the company is giving up on everyday users. McLoughlin said Uphold plans to turn its consumer app into what he called a “multi-asset, blockchain-enabled financial companion” by the end of 2026, adding features like US stocks, tokenized securities, asset-backed lending, credit cards, prediction markets, and expanded DeFi yield options on assets including XRP.
For anyone holding crypto through smaller platforms right now, this is a useful reminder: a rough retail market doesn’t just hit token prices, it hits the companies you trust to hold your coins too. Uphold’s move suggests some exchanges see steadier revenue in quietly powering other institutions’ crypto products than in chasing retail traders through another downturn — worth watching as a signal for where the next wave of crypto infrastructure money is heading.
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