As with any financial operation, staking is not risk-free. The most common risk associated with staking is incurring “slashing” penalties charged by the network. Uphold protects against any uptime-related slashing risk, and monitors staked assets 24/7 to avoid downtime-related slashing.
Uphold will make every reasonable effort to provide you with the ability to unstake your assets upon request via our flexible staking feature. In times of unusually high demand, however, you may not be able to unstake (and thus trade, send or withdraw) your assets until the end of the relevant network's unbounding period. This period varies, depending on the underlying network, and is typically set at up to 30 days, but may be longer.
Upon unstaking, the assets you staked will be returned to your Uphold account, but during the unbounding period, the value of the asset may change.
There is not yet an official way to unstake and withdraw ETH until the Ethereum blockchain supports it. This is expected to happen as part of the next major upgrade 6-12 months following the merge - also referred to as the “Shanghai” upgrade.
In the meantime, Uphold will continue to support unstaking requests by matching them, where possible, with staking requests from other Customers.
For more information about staking and any risks involved, please refer to our staking Terms & Conditions.