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Uphold just slashed 17% of its global workforce. That’s roughly 85 employees and contractors, gone — and the company isn’t pretending it’s painless.
CEO Simon McLoughlin tied the cuts directly to a strategic shift. Uphold, founded in 2015, built its name as a multi-asset retail platform — crypto, fiat currencies, precious metals, all under one roof. But the money, apparently, is somewhere else now. Financial institutions want digital asset capabilities fast, and they don’t want to build the plumbing themselves. Uphold thinks it can sell them that plumbing. The company’s enterprise business lets banks, fintechs, and broker-dealers plug into digital asset services through a single API — no need to hire compliance teams, no need to build custody infrastructure from scratch. That pitch is landing. Per McLoughlin, demand from financial institutions for crypto trading and custody solutions is rising sharply, and Uphold wants to be the backend that powers it.
Why Banks Keep Choosing White-Label Over Build
It’s not hard to see why the enterprise angle is attractive right now. Building a regulated crypto infrastructure is expensive, slow, and legally complicated. Most banks don’t want to do it. They’d rather license someone else’s stack, slap their brand on it, and move. That’s exactly what API-based and white-label solutions offer — and Uphold is positioning itself squarely in that lane.
The company isn’t alone in chasing institutional money. Plenty of crypto firms have made similar pivots over the past few years, betting that the real growth isn’t in retail trading volumes but in powering the financial institutions that retail customers already trust. Stablecoin rails, custody APIs, digital asset brokerage tools — the demand from banks and broker-dealers has been building for a while. Uphold’s move is basically a bet that the wave is here now, not in two years.
The workforce reduction is framed as a reallocation, not a retreat. Personnel and budget are shifting toward enterprise infrastructure. Unclear exactly which teams absorbed the cuts, and the company didn’t specify.
The Retail App Isn’t Dead — Not Yet
Here’s where it gets interesting. Uphold isn’t walking away from consumers. The company says it still plans to expand its retail app — US stocks, tokenized securities, asset-backed lending, prediction markets. All of that is supposedly coming by the end of 2026. So they’re cutting staff and adding features simultaneously. That’s a tight needle to thread.
The logic, as best as anyone can tell, is that the enterprise side funds the consumer side. Enterprise contracts tend to be bigger, stickier, and more predictable than retail trading fees, which bounce around with market sentiment. If Uphold can lock in a handful of bank clients on multi-year API deals, that revenue probably covers a lot of retail product development. Maybe.
But there’s real tension in running two businesses at once, especially after a layoff. Consumer product teams need attention. Enterprise sales cycles are long and demanding. Doing both well with fewer people is hard. Companies that try this kind of dual-track strategy sometimes end up doing neither thing particularly well — spread thin, underdelivering on both sides.
Uphold’s consumer roadmap is ambitious on paper. Tokenized securities and prediction markets aren’t exactly easy products to build and regulate. Asset-backed lending carries its own compliance weight. Adding US stocks means navigating broker-dealer rules. None of that is simple, and the timeline — end of 2026 — is pretty aggressive for a company that just cut nearly a fifth of its workforce.
What the Pivot Means for the Platform
Uphold has always been a bit of an odd duck in the crypto space — not quite an exchange, not quite a neobank, not quite a custody provider. It’s kind of all three, which made the consumer story complicated to tell. The enterprise angle actually simplifies the pitch. “We run the digital asset backend for financial institutions” is a cleaner sell than “we’re a multi-asset platform for retail users who want crypto and gold.”
Whether the market buys that story is another question. Enterprise crypto is competitive. There are well-funded players with deep institutional relationships already operating in that space. Uphold will need to show it can close deals and retain clients, not just announce a pivot.
McLoughlin didn’t put a revenue number on the enterprise business or name any current bank clients in the public statement. No specific deal count, no user figures, no ARR. The company is asking the market to trust the direction.
Eighty-five people lost their jobs on that bet.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many employees did Uphold lay off?
Uphold cut approximately 85 employees and contractors, representing 17% of its global workforce.
What new features is Uphold adding to its consumer app?
Uphold plans to add US stocks, tokenized securities, asset-backed lending, and prediction markets to its retail app by the end of 2026.
What does Uphold’s enterprise business actually do?
It lets banks, fintechs, and broker-dealers integrate digital asset services — including crypto trading and custody — through a single API, without building their own regulated infrastructure.
