Shangchi: Deeper transparency = verifiable trust

Our transparency is built around the fundamental principle that everyone has the right to see and control their assets.

We’ve all heard it before: trust is earned, not given. This is very true for Uphold, where we have set a new standard for user protection and accountability in financial services. We operate the only fully transparent and verifiable financial services in the world. Our transparency is built around the fundamental principle that everyone has the right to see and control their assets. Anyone can verify our reserves at any time and be assured that their assets are safe and accessible. We display real-time allocation of reserves, including user funds, so you can see that your assets are allocated at least 1 to 1 value, or more stable asset classes. I am proud to say that we are the only financial services company in the world with 100% Tier 1 capital.

At Uphold, we believe we can bring something to our members that other financial institutions can’t. We take our responsibilities seriously and want to ensure that every member who is a consumer sees value in entering and fully understands our mission of transparency. We have received a lot of feedback on our transparency page. Most comments have been positive, but we have also received many comments that indicate we still need to improve - all comments are encouraging and we are very grateful for them. More importantly, we have successfully pioneered a dialogue around transparency within the industry, and it is easy to understand that what makes the world go round is your assets.

One thing is clear: numbers without context are meaningless. Anyone can put a number or a logo on a website to say they are transparent. This has been the practice for decades, from Good Housekeeping licenses to websites displaying PCI certifications (which we do) today, protected by McAfee or xyz association. Displaying such a currency on a website is no different than putting a meaningless number. It only says "take my word for it because you don't understand the complexity behind it". Companies expect absolute trust, not to earn or prove it. It is a completely different process and perspective to earn trust through transparency, and our mission is to ensure that you don't have to use our words to describe it. We always strive to provide anyone with the tools to verify and build trust through transparency.

As a direct result of your feedback and our core value of earning trust, I’m excited to announce some changes we’ll be making over the next two quarters to improve our site and bring you deeper transparency. Here are some concrete steps we’ll take as we continue to build on our industry leadership and bring transparency to financial services:

Verifiable proof of cryptocurrency storage: Uphold’s transparent API provides access to the Uphold underlying ledger. This only shows a limited view and requires its own blockchain to complete. Therefore, we will continue to improve our Reservedger™ product to combine blockchain transactions with peer-to-peer verification.

Independently Audited FIAT/Metal Reserve Reports: Since FIAT storage cannot be encrypted yet, the next best solution is to have it audited by a highly trusted party. All of our storage holdings are currently audited, but not yet publicly available. To ensure you have full visibility into this extremely important information, we are working with our audit partners to develop a quarterly publishable report that will be displayed on our website. We will also be developing a product that provides verifiable and auditable reserves across all asset classes and accounts in real time to confirm what we are showing you in real time.

Open-source reserve ledger auditing: Not everyone is an Uber user. While our Reserveedger™ and Reservechain™ provide a quick and easy way for people who are used to using cryptocurrency to verify storage, it is not convenient for casual users or those who are trying to check the value of cryptocurrency for the first time. Therefore, we will create a simple version so that anyone can verify our reserves at any time.

Multi-layered asset classes: There is a ton of information on our transparency page. We have over 30 currencies, some cryptocurrencies, and we release new value classes regularly. Not all asset classes and currencies are created equally, some currencies have high volatility, some are hard assets like metals, and some are more cutting edge currencies that are not well known in the market. To help users understand how funds are held in storage, we will be changing our transparency site to use a multi-layered approach to display assets, how storage is tied to those assets, and we will be releasing more information in the coming months, but it will be based on a high-level hierarchy of asset classes, liquidity, and volatility. We think this will help everyone understand how our reserves are composed and the value held in each asset layer.

These are just some of the ongoing efforts to improve our transparency. Uphold is committed to providing you with the tools you need to verify our transparency, so you can feel confident placing your assets with Uphold. I’m sure some will continue to say that this is not enough and that more needs to be done. I agree that there is a lot that needs to be done and this is just the beginning. Financial services as a whole need to change and become more transparent. We are proud to be the industry leader in this important transformation and to be a role model for other companies.

Here are some questions for you: Would you buy a car without understanding how the equipment under the hood works? Or would you buy a house without understanding how the big ticket items like the roof, electricity or heating work? Why wouldn't you do the same with your most important money? Ask yourself, does my current financial institution tell me exactly how my money is used? Please contact me and let me know what you think, as you can see, we love to listen.

Original link: https://uphold.com/en/blog/posts/uphold/deeper-transparency-verifiable-trust
Source: Babbitt Information