What are the risks of staking?

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.

In the case of ETH, users run the risk of not being able to unstake until the network migrates to 2.0, which is out of Uphold’s control.

For more information on staking and any risks involved, please refer to our staking Terms & Conditions.