In an exclusive interview with themerkle.com, Uphold EVP Global Growth & Partnerships Robin O’Connell talks about how the company envisions the future of cryptocurrency saying that bitcoin is the leader over all digital and fiat currencies.

Uphold has supported several dozen fiat currencies, several cryptocurrencies, and four precious metals. Uphold team replies to Merkle’s question on which of these markets has been most successful throughout Q1 of 2016 and why.

Uphold lets its members to choose to hold their funds in 30 different types of value, which includes 23 fiat currencies, four precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, palladium) and three cryptocurrencies. The company plans to add Ethereum soon to the list.

Talking about bitcoin, he said that the digital currency has over $57M worth of bitcoin trading happening in 2016 to date. In the start of this year, bitcoin valued $352 and today, according to coindesk.com, it values $474.33.

Robin replies saying, “The main reason for bitcoin being the leader is that we’re the cheapest place to buy BTC with EUR or GBP, and that is the segment that has shown the most volume and growth, and also we have various partners now relying on Uphold for their operations, as well as some remittance operations relying on bitcoin for their last mile, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela.” He adds saying, “This is in line with our notion that bitcoin is not just a store of value, but in many ways a mechanism for interoperability between different money systems.”

Uphold previously came as Bitreserve which is a company that was built on the rails of the Bitcoin Blockchain Network, and to fund an account, members sent bitcoin via their bitcoin address. The launch of Uphold opened the doors for an entirely new audience to leverage the benefits of cloud money, said the spokesperson. He also mentioned that the company is seeing a steadily increasing usage of USD due to the company’s easier method where members can fund their accounts via bank transfer in their native currencies.

Founded in 2013 by Halsey Minor, Uphold is a cloud-based financial service whereby users can transfer deposits of bitcoin into reserve-backed currencies and commodities. It allows anyone with a device to send, receive, and exchange money and commodities for free.