Uphold Makes a Push Into Mobile Payments With Cortex MCP Acquisition

One of the biggest objections to cryptocurrency being anything more than a curiosity, speculative investment vehicle, or platform to outright criminality is that they’re not particularly useful outside of a very narrow context. Leave aside the weak protestations of “but Overstock.com takes them”, and it becomes clear that’s so. However, some progress has been made of late in trying to turn this around, and one new such effort may be starting up with Uphold’s acquisition of Cortex MCP.

Uphold—known not so long ago as Bitreserve—offers up a financial services platform that works on a surprisingly broad number of fronts. It lets users convert deposits to their account via several platforms—credit card, bank account or cryptocurrencies—into other currencies and commodities. Essentially, anyone with a mobile device can route payments from one place to another, and Uphold has so far processed over $2 billion in transactions. Granted, that’s over the last three years or so—it got its start in 2015—but that’s still a hefty slug.

Meanwhile, Cortex MCP has been developing mobile payments technology since 2012, which will give Uphold a serious leg up in the market. New payments systems should be available as a result that will allow for the use of not only standard fiat assets, but also cryptocurrencies, making these formerly questionable properties a lot more useful as a result.

One such plan is for a “closed-loop payment platform expansion” which will take advantage of Uphold’s Latin American and Mexican assets to give Cortex’s systems a broader reach.

A platform that can effectively allow users to pay with cryptocurrencies could be one impressive score, especially if it can be marketed sufficiently well to get the word out. The basic process might even be simpler than one thinks; take a kind of rolling average—a 24 hour period, maybe, or even a week—and declare that to be the value for the day. Then convert cryptocurrencies according to that rolling average and let users use the proceeds as cash. Sure, the volatility of cryptocurrencies would mean some big winners and losers in that day, but theoretically, the average fluctuations may balance out.

Giving cryptos actual versatility could make this a whole new field of value, and Uphold—with its new Cortex acquisition—may be ready to lead the way here.