Venezuelan users have until July 31 to extract their funds. Uphold’s departure happened due to the sanctions applied by the United States of America against Venezuela.
Uphold revealed today, June 23, that it would stop bringing services to Venezuela. The digital asset entity requested users residing in the Caribbean nation extract their funds as soon as possible, conveniently before July 31. However, many months before this departure announcement took effect; the company would have suspended many of its users’ accounts, in many cases hiding the real reasons behind the closure.
Some affected detailed how their business account registered with Uphold from Venezuela received a restriction from Uphold. To date, many have not received a satisfactory response from support. The profile served for receiving and sending payments in the software development field.
The support service apparently is not responding to the users’ demands. Those affected are even sending documentation, but they received no response. Before restricting access to the accounts, some users receive an email to make a withdrawal of funds.
More and More Cases
In social networks, in recent months, it was common to find comments from people highlighting that Uphold had decided to suspend their account, allegedly arbitrarily.
Blockages have been frequent among Venezuelans, especially in the community of software developers, due to all the limitations of accessing foreign currency accounts in the nation, with Uphold and PayPal being the most prominent alternative to solve this problem.
However, it is vital to consider that the blocks do not seem to be an exclusive service aimed at Venezuela since many users from other nations have also highlighted restrictions on their accounts.
Bitcoin Cannot Get Blocked
This situation shows how centralized entities can have complete access to their features and even their services whenever they want. In case of governmental struggles, they can even dare to suspend their services and features to citizens of a specific nationality.
In this case, Venezuelans have been quite vulnerable since Uphold was a popular platform among freelancers and used as a vehicle for receiving international payments for providing their services.
In this situation, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies prove to be powerful tools. For more existing prohibitions, as long as they get housed in a self-custody wallet, they cannot get restrained or confiscated by any entity or administration.
By: Jenson Nuñez
