Our transparency is built around the fundamental principle that everyone has the right to total visibility into, and control over, their funds. Anyone, at any time, can confirm our reserve and ensure that his or her funds are safe and accessible. We show real time allocations of the reserve that consist of consumer funds so you can see your funds are backed by at least a 1:1 allocation of value in the same or more stable asset class. If you want to read more about our upcoming plans for building even more trust and transparency into how you use Uphold, please visit our blog.
Real-Time Status
Real-Time Provability of Solvency
For individuals holding their money in a bank, as well as for financial regulators ensuring the protection of consumers, the solvency of that institution - the ability to pay consumers back their deposits - is a primary concern. Most banks report this within their financial reporting, filed quarterly within lengthy documents.
At Uphold, we believe that everyone holding money with us is entitled to audit our solvency at any point in time, not just quarterly and not hidden within complex reports.
On our transparency page, we voluntarily publish our internal ledgers, displaying our current financial obligations and real liquid assets matching those obligations side-by-side in real time. This allows anyone to view our full reserve status and for members to be sure their funds are fully available at all times.
Reservechain™ and Reserveledger™
At Uphold, we have created the first-ever verifiable, secure, and real-time transparency system for a financial services company. This system consists of two key elements: the Reservechain™, a real-time, anonymous public record of all the transactions that occur across our network; and our Reserveledger™, a real-time public record of all changes in the assets in our reserve to balance the obligations we have to our members.
Reservechain™
Our Reservechain™ is a completely anonymous record of all the transactions that have occurred on our network. It acts as a register for three different types of transactions: fund additions, withdrawals and transfers. For example, in a typical transaction of an exchange of value on the system, the Reservechain™ publishes the transfer of value, the rate we guaranteed at the time and used for the conversion, and any fees exacted by third parties and any commission which may have been applied in the case of an unverified member, or an exchange to or from a precious metal.
To maintain the traceability of our system, we also publish the "sources" of the funds sent. These sources identify previous transactions from which the value that was sent/transferred was drawn from, making all value in our network completely traceable, both from any point moving forward in time, and any point moving backwards in time all the way back to the genesis of that value on the network.
No personally identifiable information is published through these resources and, unlike the bitcoin blockchain, our transaction log is completely anonymous (aside from your own transactions, in which case you can trace both the origin and destination of funds). When value enters or leaves our service via bitcoin, we also reference the corresponding transaction ID on the bitcoin blockchain so that value can be followed from the blockchain, into and through Uphold, and back out.
Reserveledger™
The Reserveledger is critical because it makes visible to the world what firms have traditionally kept hidden away. But visibility and transparency are not quite the same thing. True transparency comes through revealing what we do on the inside of our reserves to secure the obligations documented on the Reservechain™. We do this through the Reserveledger™.
Like a traditional accounting ledger, each entry documents either a change in our liabilities, or a change we have made to our assets, or both.
The latest Reservechain and Reserveledger data can be downloaded directly from our API at http://developer.uphold.com.