Uphold, a well-known cryptocurrency exchange, has announced the release of a new cryptocurrency-linked debit card for users in the United Kingdom that offers them reward rates of up to 4% in the virtual currency $XRP.
Uphold's bitcoin debit card won't incur non-sterling transaction fees, making it "perfect for travel and use abroad," the company claimed in a press release shared with CryptoGlobe. The card is slated to go on sale in the US the following week and will be "completely available by the end of the month."
The document states that there are no transaction or membership fees and that incentives for using the debit card are earned in fiat money (GBP for UK users and USD for US users) and paid out in $XRP.
Customers "just convert their crypto, gold, fiat, or other assets to GBP or USD" on the site, and then use the funds to load Uphold Card, which can be used to make transactions everywhere MasterCard cards are accepted.
The paper states that the card will initially be accessible digitally before being launched in physical form later this year to be used for payments and at MasterCard ATMs throughout the world. Both GooglePay and ApplePay are supported by the card.
Uphold's CEO, Simon McLoughlin, was cited as saying:
"We want our customers to be able to easily spend the crypto in their accounts for purchases anywhere in the world and earn XRP rewards with every purchase, making Uphold a central point of their financial lives. That’s exactly what the Uphold Card delivers."
The decision was taken shortly after prominent fintech company Ripple announced a new alliance to bring real estate transactions to the XRP Ledger, the native network of the $XRP coin.
Notably, XRP has attracted more attention in recent weeks. As previously reported, considerable inflows have recently been observed in cryptocurrency investment products providing investors exposure to $XRP, at a time when the U.S. Investors believe that the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) case against Ripple and two of its executives is "increasingly shaky."
According to CryptoGlobe, the price of XRP skyrocketed last month after news broke that both Ripple and the SEC were seeking a decision in their protracted legal dispute through a process known as a "summary judgment."
Based on the documents, neither party wants the case to go all the way to trial. In 2020, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple and two of its officials, alleging that they sold unregistered securities when they released XRP coins worth $1.3 billion. XRP is not a security, according to Ripple.
