Bittrex International has joined a coalition of leading blockchain organizations, including Uphold, Cred, Blockchain at Berkeley, Brave in support of a universal transparent reserve and custody standard that mints and burns Proxy tokens via the Universal Protocol Platform (UP Platform). The UP Platform, which plans to introduce the Universal Dollar and Universal Euro later this month, serves as the hub for the creation and management of ‘proxy’ tokens and user features that will drive mass user adoption of cryptocurrencies. 

“We’re thrilled to join an Alliance of like-minded blockchain companies dedicated to incubating blockchain-based technologies and helping projects go mainstream,” said Bill Shihara, Bittrex International.  “The blockchain industry needs technology that can build trust and transparency, and the platform the Alliance has built should help drive mass utility and adoption.”

The founding members include:

• Uphold  – Founded in 2014, Uphold has over 1 million users around the world and has traded over $4 billion on its digital money platform and reserve ledger.
• Cred – Founded by a group of former Paypal executives with over $300 million in lending capital, Cred has introduced a revolutionary lending and earning 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.

“The UP Platform solves real usability and familiarity problems faced by the next hundred million users of digital assets,” said Brendan Eich, co-founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript.

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 and inheritability.

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 realization 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 digital representations of their underlying assets 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 early days of the internet were very similar to the world of blockchain today, with many different technology platforms fragmented and incapable of communicating with one other,” said JP Thieriot, President of the UP Alliance and Co-founder of Uphold. “We believe that the Universal Protocol Platform is a technology that has the potential to connect blockchain technologies, much like the breakthrough of the TCP and IP protocols that drove the internet towards mass adoption. “

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 Universal Protocol Alliance is coalition of companies promoting a new technology that gets stronger as the network of members and use cases gets bigger,” said Dan Schatt, Chairman of the UP Alliance and Cofounder of Cred.  “We are actively seeking partners that would like to benefit from this new technology that we believe will set the standard for transparency, convenience, and make an unprecedented amount of liquidity available for the ecosystem.”