Buying Crypto from the Uphold Exchange

Learning outcomes

Transfer funds to the Uphold exchange from my bank account

Buy some Bitcoin

Withdraw Bitcoin from my Uphold wallet and deposit onto my Trezor wallet

Transfer from Bank to Uphold

To start you need to log into your uphold account either on the mobile app or through the website. Navigate to the transactions section, here we want setup a deposit of funds into Uphold so we can buy crypto.

Highlight the arrow in the from dropdown, then select the bank account to receive funds from

Select the GBP bank account you want to use to send the funds from

You will see the screen below on a mobile device, the web will be similar.

The bank account must be in the same name as the account holder.

The default currency that will be deposited in your account

Uphold bank details for you to use to set up a SEPA bank transfer, no need to do an international bank transfer.

Very important to enter the reference correctly, it tells uphold which account and currency to credit the funds to.

Bank name and address, although I didn't need to provide those details when I setup a payee.

You would take this information and add a new payee to your bank, preferably in your new bank account that you opened in a previous blog post.

Deposit and buy Bitcoin

We know we want to buy Bitcoin when the funds arrive so we can setup multiple payee entries in our bank assigning the buy intention to any of the available crypto currency.

To do this you change the currency in this dropdown

Select the dropdown and choose Bitcoin

The To currency selection should look like this if you chose bitcoin

Bitcoin Reference

Now the currency being credited has changed, it has also changed the reference. Please make sure you get this code correct when you select the currency. Enter it in the reference section when you create another payee, give it a label of Uphold BTC so you can find it.

The reference has changed, this will credit your bitcoin account. It is very important you enter this carefully

The bank details all stay the same, you just need to ensure the reference is entered correct. Contact support if your funds don't arrive and you realise this code was input incorrectly.

The reference codes are unique to my uphold account, please don't use them by mistake as your money will be held in the uphold account. Your bank name will not match the reference account name so it will get blocked.

Create a New Payee

Log into your bank via internet banking, find the screen to add a new payee. Fill in the details from the information you recevied when you performed the above actions on your uphold account.

The bank I use in the UK is Nationwide, when I created the payee the system gave me a number of warnings regarding the payee I was setting up. This is normal, please ensure you have entered the information exactly as shown on the screen.

Read the information in the prompts, if your happy to proceed then click yes only if your sure you want to setup the new payee for Uphold.

The warnings are there to protect against someone forcing you to do something against your will, if that is the case then stop. Otherwise it is safe to continue.

To test the payment method, use a small amount of £10 to check everything is working. When that has arrived it will give you the confidence that you can send larger amounts. There is a £10,000 transaction limit, you can create multiple transactions in a day if you need send more.

This is what I like so much about Uphold, the funds arrive within seconds of sending to the exchange.

Checking my bank tranactions there are no fees to send the funds, I just have a single transaction that has sent £10 to uphold.

Next I will work out what the fee was to buy our £10 of bitcoin from Uphold, see how it compares to our ATM option.

I will turn to excel again to do some calculations.

Uphold purchase fees

As you can see from the grid below the purchase fees are very low when dealing with an exchange, it really is worth investing the time to register an account.

From the grid above we can see there are very small fees for buying bitcoin on Uphold.

When we want to sell bitcoin and send it to the bank there is also very small fee for the transaction.

Withdrawing Bitcoin to a wallet

As discussed in a previous post, we wanted to buy some bitcoin and store it in a hardware wallet.

As with the transaction we created for sending funds for our bank to Uphold, we use the same transaction screen to send the bitcoin we have in our exchange wallet to the bitcoin network.

In the From window select the Bitcoin wallet to send funds from

In the To window, select the Bitcoin network option. You may have to scroll around a little to find the list of Crypto Networks.

The screen gives you all the information you need to record the withdrawal fee allowing you to decide if you want to go ahead with the transaction.

Clicking Preview withdrawal will display a window to enter the bitcoin deposit address, you can with copy and paste the code or scan the QR code with your phones camera, this is a more reliable method.

After you have entered your bitcoin deposit address, click next to move to the following screen

Lets work out the fee value.

Bitcoin has always been expensive to move around and will continue to do so because the market value is so high, the was a time when the satoshi fee was reduced because it was expensive. It might be time for the bitcoin developers to review the rate to reduce it again to make it more attractive.

In this case I won't be sending the bitcoin to my wallet as the transaction will loose too much money.

Using another crypto currency

There are other crypto-currencys that have much cheaper network transaction fees, you could instead use Ripple or XRP to transfer funds around.

What have we learned

We have found the bank details and reference code to allow us to create a payee in our banking website

Transfered sterling to the exchange, it arrived instantly and bought the bitcoin we requested based on the reference code. If we wanted other currencies we could create more payee enteries with difference codes.

Getting used to looking at the fees that will be charged before we perform an action, checking the amount and that your happy paying it will ensure you don't make expensive mistakes in the future.

Calculated the cost of buying bitcoin so we can make a decision which option is the most cost effective regarding time duration and fees.

Attempted to withdraw some bitcoin from our exchange wallet and send it to a Trezor wallet, the amount I had to transfer was very small. The network fee was too high and would have resulted in nearly all the funds taken from the transaction fee.

So based on that I decided not to transfer the bitcoin to my wallet.

Next Steps

Now we have proved the account details for sending funds to Uphold is correct I can now send more money to buy some additional currencies.

The use of the bitcoin network was too expensive, so instead I will demonstrate the use of the Ripple (XRP) network instead as I know that is much cheaper to transfer than the bitcoin network.

Your task

I would like you to open an uphold account, create a payee on your bank account for a crypto-currency of your choice and then send some money to the exchange.

Using what we have learn't from previous posts you can calculate the value of your coins and what profit you would like.

I am planning some detailed blogs on the practical side so please look out for those in the future.

If you can't wait please get in touch with any questions you may have