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Uphold just shed 17% of its global workforce. That’s 85 people — permanent staff and contractors both — gone as the New York-based digital asset platform pivots hard toward enterprise clients and away from a retail trading market that’s basically stalled out.
CEO Simon McLoughlin didn’t hide the rationale. He said he still believes in the long-term prospects of digital assets and blockchain technology, but the numbers on the retail side are ugly right now. Total cryptocurrency market capitalization fell to roughly $2.1 trillion by the end of the second quarter. Higher interest rates, geopolitical tensions, and persistent outflows from crypto ETFs all hit at once. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs alone saw net outflows of $6.9 billion across May and June. That’s not a blip. That’s a sustained pullback, and Uphold clearly decided it can’t just wait it out.
Enterprise Push Drives the Restructuring
The layoffs cut across multiple regions. Uphold has offices in the U.K. and elsewhere internationally, and the company was clear: none of those locations are closing. Everyone still there keeps their job. The cuts were targeted, not a broad shutdown of any particular geography.
What Uphold is actually doing is doubling down on the part of its business that’s growing. The enterprise platform lets banks, fintechs, and broker-dealers plug crypto trading and custody services directly into their own products. That’s a different kind of client than a retail user downloading an app to buy some bitcoin on a Tuesday. Enterprise deals are bigger, stickier, and probably a lot more predictable as revenue. The company was founded in 2015 and has spent years building out the infrastructure for both retail and institutional customers to buy, sell, and hold assets ranging from cryptocurrencies to equities. Now it’s leaning into the institutional side in a serious way.
And the timing kind of makes sense. Retail crypto volumes are soft across the board, not just at Uphold. Plenty of other platforms have made similar calls over the past year or so. When trading fees dry up and users go quiet, the math on maintaining a large workforce aimed at consumer acquisition gets hard to justify fast.
Consumer App Still in the Plan — Just Smaller Priority
Uphold isn’t walking away from retail entirely. McLoughlin wants to turn the consumer app into what the company calls a multi-asset, blockchain-enabled financial companion. The plan includes U.S. stocks, tokenized securities, asset-backed lending, and expanded DeFi yield opportunities. No hard launch date was nailed down publicly, though the company pointed to the end of the year as a rough target.
That’s a pretty ambitious list of features. Tokenized securities and asset-backed lending in particular aren’t easy to bolt onto an existing platform — regulatory complexity alone can slow those things down considerably. Whether Uphold can actually ship all of that on schedule with a smaller team is unclear. The company didn’t specify which teams absorbed the bulk of the cuts, so it’s hard to know if product development got hit or if the reductions were mostly in sales, support, and operations.
What’s probably true is that the enterprise side is generating enough momentum to justify the resource reallocation. Banks and fintechs have been circling digital asset services for a while now, and a number of them want to offer crypto without building the infrastructure themselves. Uphold’s pitch is essentially: we’ve already built it, just integrate with us. That’s a reasonable value proposition in a market where most big financial institutions still don’t want to touch the custody and compliance headaches directly.
The broader industry has been moving this direction for a while. Several crypto-native companies have shifted focus toward B2B and infrastructure plays as retail enthusiasm cooled from its 2021 peak. It’s not a new playbook, but Uphold is now committing to it more explicitly than before.
More announcements on the enterprise side are expected in the coming months, per the company. No specifics were shared on what those might cover — new bank partnerships, expanded custody capabilities, new geographies. Just a signal that there’s more coming.
For the 85 people who lost their jobs, the timing is rough. The crypto job market isn’t exactly flush right now, with the broader sector still working through the hangover from the last cycle’s excess hiring. Uphold didn’t say anything publicly about severance terms or transition support.
McLoughlin’s confidence in digital assets long-term is probably genuine — it’s hard to run a company like Uphold without believing the underlying thesis. But confidence doesn’t pay the bills in a down market. The restructuring is a bet that enterprise revenue can carry the company through the retail slump and that the consumer app rebuild can wait a little longer to find its audience.
U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs saw $6.9 billion in net outflows across May and June alone.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many employees did Uphold lay off and what percentage of its workforce does that represent?
Uphold cut 85 employees, covering both permanent staff and contractors, which amounts to 17% of its global workforce.
What new features is Uphold planning for its consumer app?
Uphold plans to add U.S. stocks, tokenized securities, asset-backed lending, and expanded DeFi yield opportunities to its consumer app, targeting a rollout by the end of the year.
