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Story: Uphold Cuts 85 Jobs and Bets the Company on Enterprise Crypto APIs

By Julie Binoche

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Why Banks Keep Choosing White-Label Over Build. It's not hard to see why the enterprise angle is attractive right now.

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The Retail App Isn't Dead — Not Yet. Here's where it gets interesting. Uphold isn't walking away from consumers.

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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…

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The workforce reduction is framed as a reallocation, not a retreat. Personnel and budget are shifting toward enterprise infrastructure.

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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,…

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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…

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Read also: Uphold Cuts 85 Jobs and Bets the Company on Enterprise Crypto Infrastructure

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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.

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Uphold's consumer roadmap is ambitious on paper. Tokenized securities and prediction markets aren't exactly easy products to build and regulate.

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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…

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Related: Crypto Treasury Firms Dump Bitcoin for AI Bets, Shares Still Bleeding

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