Bitcoin exchange company Bitreserve, Inc. has changed its name to Uphold, Inc. as part of a repositioning of the company that sees it integrate with the global financial ecosystem in ways that are rare for Bitcoin exchanges.

The biggest change sees Uphold (previously Bitreserve) allow consumers, businesses and charities to fund their Uphold accounts via bank transfer or by linking a credit or debit card, in addition to the original Bitcoin offering.

Support for bank transfers and credit cards will be available as of today in 33 European countries. In the coming weeks the same service will also be available in the United States, China and India.

In another first, the company plans to roll out in December both physical and virtual payment cards with Visa, MasterCard and Discover Card that will allow users to pay merchants online or in-store, directly from their Uphold accounts.

If it’s not immediately obvious, so far the biggest change with Uphold is that that it is no longer a Bitcoin-only service, and although they are continuing to offer Bitcoin services they are now facilitating payments, nearly PayPal-like, between bank accounts, debit and credit cards, in addition to cryptocurrencies.

The pitch is all about cost, with Uphold allowing members to move, convert, hold and transact in any form of fiat currency or cryptocurrency instantly, securely, and mostly for free with the exception that a charge of 2.75 percent applies if members choose to fund their account with a debit or credit card.

“Our mission is to make it easy and frictionless for anyone, anywhere to move, convert, hold and transact in any form of money or commodity securely, instantly and for free,” Uphold President and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Watson said in an email sent to SiliconANGLE. “By connecting the world’s legacy and fragmented financial networks and systems with the world’s leading cloud-money platform we bring to the marketplace instant,  transparent, accountable and free financial services for all.”

“We’re simplifying and radically reducing costs for all financial transactions and services — from currency conversions to international money transfers and payroll to bill payment and remittance,” Watson furthered.

Compliance

It’s an interesting shift for a company that launched strictly as a Bitcoin exchange and credit where due: what they, on paper, seem to be offering provides a wealth of potential.

More importantly though is that Uphold comes with regulatory compliance, something we see more and more in the Bitcoin space (such as the Winklevoss’ Gemini service), but with a hybrid model that we’ve not perhaps seen before; it would be wrong to call Uphold a bank but they’ve certainly switched to a financial services provider model that given its cryptocurrency support along with that of fiat currency potentially does place it long term against the likes of PayPal, but with better options such as debit cards and similar.

As we’ve covered previously Uphold (previously Bitreserve) has raised roughly $13 million to-date through a combination of traditional venture capital and crowdfunding.

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