Decentralized Credit, Borrowing and Yield Services Opened up for Mainstream Users
San Francisco, California, USA, October 27th, 2025, Chainwire
- Uphold opens up easier access to the Exactly Protocol
- Customers can earn yield on or borrow against their digital assets
- Loans can be spent using a Visa credit card
- Digital assets supported by the service include XRP, ETH, USDC, and BTC
Uphold – the modern infrastructure provider for on-chain finance – today announces its integration with the Exactly Protocol, a borrow and lending protocol that lets people earn interest on, or access credit against, their digital assets.
The new service enables Uphold users to borrow against their digital assets and to spend the loans through a Visa credit card offering unprecedented real-world utility. Alternatively, users can also choose to loan their digital assets – including XRP – and earn yield.
The Exactly Protocol opens up access to low-cost loans secured by digital assets, 24/7, without the need for credit checks, delivering on crypto’s promise of financial inclusion and fairness.
“On-chain borrowing and lending is one of the best use cases in crypto,” said Simon McLoughlin, CEO of Uphold. “But until now, it has only been accessible to technical users. With our Exa integration, we’re stripping away the complexity and opening it up to everyone. ‘Our customers can take out an Exa loan at a much lower rate compared with a traditional bank. Plus there are no credit checks and the loan is available anytime, virtually instantly. It can be paid back in flexible installments and gives users liquidity without selling their assets.”
Uphold intends to open up test access for the new service in November. Customers can sign up to take part through the App.
Gabriel Gruber, Founder of the Exactly Protocol, said: “Our goal at Exactly Protocol is to bring the stability and predictability of traditional finance to the crypto world. Being integrated by a leading crypto infrastructure provider like Uphold is a major milestone, expanding access to our protocol and accelerating our vision for a truly decentralized credit market.”
The service will launch for users in Florida and Latin America in December with broader U.S. availability in the first quarter of 2026.
“The number one thing we hear from our XRP community is, ‘How do we earn on our holdings,” continued McLoughlin. “With this new integration, they’ll be able to do just that.”
In many markets around the world, digital assets have found favor among the public as useful protection against local currency devaluation. Beyond the universal benefits of the service, Uphold’s integration with Exactly will give customers in Latin America – and in other markets where traditional financial services are less mature or enjoy less trust – access to a wider range of financial options.
For the integration, Uphold’s platform connects with a specialized, permissioned version of the Exactly Protocol, creating an intuitive service that improves accessibility to decentralized finance (DeFi). Crypto assets supported by the service include USDC, XRP, ETH, and BTC.
About Uphold
Uphold, is a financial technology company that believes on-chain services are the future of finance. It provides modern infrastructure for on-chain payments, banking and investments. Offering Consumer Services, Business Services and Institutional Trading, Uphold makes financial services easy and trustworthy for millions of customers in more than 140 countries.
Uphold integrates with more than 30 trading venues, including centralized and decentralized exchanges, to deliver superior liquidity and optimal execution. Uphold never loans out customer assets and is always 100% reserved. The company pioneered radical transparency and uniquely publishes its assets and liabilities every 30 seconds on a public website (https://uphold.com/en-us/transparency).
About Exactly Protocol
Exactly is a decentralized, non-custodial, and open-source protocol that provides an autonomous interest rate market to lenders and borrowers while setting interest rates based on credit supply and demand, enabling users to frictionlessly exchange the time value of their crypto assets at both variables and fixed interest rates for the first time in DeFi.
Aside from taking loans and making deposits at variable interest rates from a Variable Rate Pool, Exactly enables users to do so at fixed rates through interaction with several Fixed Rate Pools, each representing a specific maturity date. Interest rates are determined based on the credit utilization rate of each Fixed Rate Pool. (https://docs.exact.ly/getting-started/introduction)
Notes to editors:
1 = Linked bank account applies for US only.