Uphold No Longer Supported in Canada

I received the following email today and would like to know how I will continue to receive BAT for using Brave if Canadian Uphold accounts will no longer be supported. Also, which custodian will Brave be using so I can transfer my BAT there instead of selling it or paying extra transfer fees.

Withdrawal from Canada

We’re sorry to let you know that from today, June 11, Uphold will no longer support accounts in Canada.

You’ll have until September 8, 2025 to either:

  • Withdraw your crypto via the blockchain
  • or
  • Sell your crypto for Canadian Dollars (CA$) prior to withdrawing your funds via [Interac].

After September 8th:

  • We will automatically convert your crypto balances into Canadian Dollars, pending withdrawal*.
  • Blockchain withdrawals, Sends and trading will be disabled.
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Same. Any chance Brave will expand the Solana self custody program soon so that we will still have a place to collect and store BAT?

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Can we simply connect our rewards to the brave wallet? If yes, how to we unlink our rewards from uphold?

If Brave doesn’t let us do this, looks like alot of Canadians will have no reason to use brave browser anymore.

Would be nice to hear from Brave support

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You can find more information on their change here: https://support.uphold.com/hc/en-us/articles/37674838123035-Canadian-services-withdrawal

We do have an alternative for those effected. Rewards onchain with Solana.

We’re working to open up self custody access for more Rewards users, but you can sign up for early access below. You’ll need a valid Discord account.

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Same. Wondering if us Canadians will still get BAT or if it’s dead for us indefinitely.

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This would be a working idea if it didn’t tell us that we can Only submit Rewards Payment IDs for Rewards profiles that are NOT already connected to a custodial account like Uphold.

Would be nice if we didn’t need to abandon our existing stuff which may have multiple devices linked

For the Solana chain, Could you let me know what wallets work… IS Trust or Metamask appropriate for this

Hopefully Brave will prioritize this for us Canadians

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I came straight here after getting the email from Uphold. I was trying to simply walk through the Brave Rewards and link it to any other option, but there’s no option to relink our Brave Rewards out of Uphold. Will be monitoring this to see what the procedure is moving forward.

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Creating a new profile for the self-custody guestlist is a bummer, because we loose everything (cookies, extensions, configurations, etc). There should be an exception for Canadian since this is not driven by us users, but rather due to Uphold.

You do not need to reset your entire profile, only your Rewards account. Soon, no more invites and it’ll be open access.

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How do you reset your rewards account without resetting your profile? The ability to simply unlink an account seems to have disappeared from Brave.

I hope Brave hurries up with the open access since there is now simply no other working option for rewards.

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Um, choose to reset it from the Rewards menu…

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/10007969237901-Resetting-Brave-Rewards

Yeah, that’s not correct or useful as it disables rewards.

You used to be able to simply unlink the account from an online exchange and continue to accrue rewards locally.

Lmao. It resets it. Puts it back to default where then you enable it and you would have to connect it again. What did you think resetting your Rewards is supposed to do?

It just does it for your Rewards profile only and not the entire browser. It’s been years now that we have been restricted to one account per profile and was left with no choice but to reset the profile to connect to anything else.

So we basically need to wait until the day after we receive rewards for the given month before resetting it. Seems like it would be so much easier to just let us unlink uphold from our profiles…but hey why make it easy for users

Will we need to re-sync all of our devices for the rewards after resetting the profile???

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Already reset, in what way will you send invitations to Canadian users?"

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@Dpetzz Ads viewed will be paid. Even if you reset, your earnings from Ads viewed on your previous profile, up approximately to the time you reset, will still be deposited to your account in the next payout period.

This is mentioned in the reset instructions here. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/10007969237901-Resetting-Brave-Rewards

Thanks!

I think I was pretty clear about what I wanted it to do. Since there is no longer any alternative way to store BAT. it should behave as it once did and allow for the local collection unattached to an exchange.

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Hello @Username9 - There is an alternative with our self custody solution. If you do not wish to sign up for early access you can hang tight until we have open access available.

The method you’re suggesting was previously called vBAT and was sunset a couple of years ago. You can find more on this here: https://brave.com/blog/vbat-sunset/

Please let me know if I can help clarify anything else. Thanks!

@Dpetzz to be clear, the old “disconnect” was just a logout button so it wouldn’t display your balance. It didn’t actually disconnect anything from the back end. It just wasn’t plausible to maintain this, but I think there were also some issues around abuse.

Anyway, let me quote from Chriscat, the Project Manager for Rewards at Brave.

Solana (non-custodial) to the rescue. Everyone should be getting an invite very shortly. And by the time your Uphold account is no longer active due to these changes at Uphold, you’ll be able to just reset Rewards and connect a self-custody Solana address instead.

Edit: Currently, we are only sending out invites to those who aren’t already connected to Uphold. You can reset Brave Rewards so that you are no longer connected to Uphold, and then wait for an invite. (Soon, no more invites and it’ll be open access.)

He also addressed concerns similar to those that @Username9 mentioned:

Even if you reset now, you will still receive a payout to your Uphold account in early July (assuming our transfer to your account isn’t blocked in Uphold’s systems). This is because our backend knows that there is BAT due to your Uphold account for ads this month, regardless of whether you reset and switch to a new profile that isn’t connected to Uphold.

Complete open access probably won’t be available by the end of this month, but we are prioritizing sending invites out to non-connected Rewards users in Canada given this situation.

These messages and more can be found in replies to a Reddit thread at https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1l90ea8/comment/mx8zj85/?context=3

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The second part of the original post had a question that I also have:

“Will we need to re-sync all of our devices for the rewards after resetting the profile???”