Universal Protocol Alliance Launched to Bring Interoperability and Safeguarding of Digital Assets

Blockchain at Berkeley, Uphold, Brave, and Cred (formerly Libra Credit) announce a reserve standard for decentralized assets

A coalition of leading blockchain organizations, including Uphold, Cred, Blockchain at Berkeley, and Brave, announced a universal transparent reserve and custody standard that introduces ‘Proxy’ digital assets to the world via the Universal Protocol Platform (UP Platform). The UP Platform, which recently announced early backing by a group of leading institutional investors, serves as the hub for the creation and management of ‘proxy’ tokens and user features that will drive mass user adoption of cryptocurrencies.

The founding members announced are:

• Uphold – Founded in 2014, Uphold has over 850,000 users around the world and has traded over $3.5 billion on its digital money platform and reserve ledger.
• Cred (formerly known as Libra Credit) – Founded in 2018 by a group of former PayPal executives, Cred has introduced a revolutionary lending protocol and platform for digital assets.
• Brave – From the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, Brave radically improves internet browsing and leadership in the realms of privacy and digital advertising with the Basic Attention Token.
• Blockchain at Berkeley – An academic organization at University of California, Berkeley, that provides educational resources, consultancy, and R&D to some of the biggest blockchain projects in the world.

Currently, digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum exist on separate blockchain platforms and cannot interact with one another. This results in significant inefficiencies as separate blockchain projects are unable to collaborate in any meaningful way, without complex and often costly work-around solutions. To date, this has greatly hindered innovation in blockchain and the realisation of its vast potential to fundamentally disrupt a wide array of economic, social and industrial sectors. The UP Platform looks to solve this issue and allow all cryptocurrencies to become accessible on a single network through the introduction of Proxy Tokens.

Proxy Tokens are a digital representation of their underlying asset and can exist on other blockchains. Using these Proxy Tokens, the UP Platform creates a common universal language that allows distinct blockchains and token-based projects to interact freely and frictionlessly with each other. This technology enables Proxy Bitcoin, for example, to exist on Ethereum and be reasoned with directly by Ethereum’s preponderance of decentralized applications, decentralized exchanges and smart contracts.

The UP Platform will publish the value of its assets in custody in real-time on a public blockchain. The reserve will also be subject to quarterly third-party audits that will be shared with the community to demonstrate the financial soundness of the Proxy Token ecosystem.

The platform will enable a new world of tokenized digital assets - ranging from Proxy blockchains such as Bitcoin, to Proxy securities and Proxy Private Equity – and will facilitate the instant and seamless conversion of different forms of value. In doing so, the UP Platform will unlock the vast and untapped full potential of blockchain to transform how individuals and businesses store and transfer value, with Proxy Tokens representing the next generation of digital money.

The UP Platform will also enable decentralized exchanges to offer tokens previously unable to reason with each other, and private custody of any digital asset with a highly-secure wallet option. For everyday users, the platform introduces groundbreaking new types of safeguards that render cryptocurrencies significantly more practical and convenient to own, such as private key recovery, inheritability and loss assurance.