Upvest Updates

Deprecation of Ethereum Fees endpoint

2022-08-29T10:57:32.057Z

Upvest will discontinue the Ethereum Fees (https://fees.upvest.co/estimate_eth_fees) endpoint by September 15th, 2022. If you are interested in taking over the project and maintaining it open-source please reach out to us at [email protected].

Worldwide Google Outage

2020-12-14T12:12:00.001Z

Google is experiencing a worldwide outage affecting the majority of their services, including Google Cloud, which we use to run a number of systems.

Unfortunately, this means that a significant portion of our API services are impacted, and we recommend customers avoid making Write-based API calls until Google are able to restore their services.

More information is available on Google’s monitoring page.

[Update] Google resolved their outage. The impact to Upvest services only resulted in degraded functionality to some Write-based API calls for approximately 30 minutes.

API Hostname Update

2020-09-28T12:26:00.001Z

In an effort to clean up our API endpoint hostnames (whilst conforming with more common industry terminology) we are going to be renaming our test environment from “playground” to "sandbox". This will impact any customers using our existing playground hostnames, including:

api-playground.eu.upvest.co
api.playground.eu.upvest.co
api.playground.upvest.co

The new (and only) hostname for all connections to our ~~playground~~ sandbox environment is:

api.sandbox.upvest.co

We will also be changing our production API hostname from:

api.eu.upvest.co

to:

api.upvest.co

Please update your code to use these new hostnames for any calls to our APIs.

We plan on keeping the old hostnames pointing to the new ones for the next month, but these will be sunset shortly thereafter.

Any questions, just contact us on Slack or by [email protected]" target="_blank" rel="noopener">email!

Coronavirus Update

2020-03-16T10:35:00.001Z

With the tumultuous global events, we would like to provide our customers with some reassurance via this brief update on Upvest’s status.

First and foremost, the health of our employees and partners is paramount. As an already agile fintech company, we were able to take the early decision to start mitigating the risks posed to us by this pandemic, and have already been very successfully working as a fully remote team for the past three weeks. This has meant staying out of our office, cancelling conference attendance and all non-essential travel.

What this all means for you, our customers, is that you can expect the same uninterrupted service and support moving forward. We are continuing to build the next generation of tools for our blockchain customers, while trying to do our part to mitigate the proliferation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We will take all the necessary steps to ensure that everything remains business-as-usual.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions. We’re more than happy to coordinate a videoconference call or webinar.

Stay safe, stay healthy!

Announcing the Upvest Fees endpoints

2020-02-12T14:22:00.001Z

UPDATE: the Fees endpoints have been deprecated: https://updates.upvest.co/publications/deprecation-of-ethereum-fees-endpoint

We’re excited to announce the beta launch of Upvest Fees endpoints for Ethereum and Bitcoin.

The fees provided by these endpoints come from data obtained from a number of external fee sources, and have undergone additional smoothing to produce a very reliable result. This also means that these endpoints are self-healing, such that they are able to return reliable fee data in the event that one or more of the data sources are unreliable or unavailable.

The following is a sample response from the Ethereum endpoint:
(https://fees.upvest.co/estimate_eth_fees)

{
"success":true,
"updated":"2020-02-12T12:51:00.654Z",
"estimates":{
"fastest":11.190000000000001,
"fast":8.38,
"medium":5.32,
"slow":3.2
}
}

For Ethereum, the transaction confirmation speeds are defined as follows:

Fastest: next block (i.e. <30 seconds)
Fast: below 2 minutes (<10 blocks)
Medium: around 5 minutes (<20 blocks)
Slow: below 30 minutes (a.k.a safe-low, <120 blocks)

These endpoints are currently at the beta release stage, but can be actively trialled. We welcome any feedback.

Check out our docs for more information on how to calculate transaction fees, and also our blog post for this feature.

Announcing the Complex Transaction endpoints ✨

2020-01-24T08:28:00.001Z

We’re happy to announce the beta release of our Complex Transaction endpoints for Ethereum.

Their purpose is to fill the gap between a standard (Ether/ERC-20) Transfer transaction, and the more generic General Purpose Signing Interface, by providing the flexibility to craft any blockchain payload (i.e. a custom smart contract function call), have it signed using an Upvest-hosted key and then broadcast to the blockchain, all via a single API request.

The added benefits are that, because the transaction is broadcast by Upvest, we are able to also fund the transaction fees, meaning that the signing wallet does not need to have Ether in it. In addition to this, Upvest is also able to track this transaction from broadcast to confirmation (or failure).

For more information, please see our documentation 📖

We’re happy to announce our €7mn Series A Funding Round

2019-12-13T10:41:00.001Z

[Repost from our Medium article]

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a €7 million Series A by Notion Capital, Holtzbrinck Ventures, Partech, and Speedinvest to support us on our mission to build the financial infrastructure of the future.
We’re excited to have such knowledgeable and experienced partners on our side on this ambitious journey. Notion, Holtzbrinck, Partech, and Speedinvest are among the largest European early stage and growth VCs with previous investments into successful companies like GoCardless, Tradeshift, Zalando, HelloFresh, Flixbus, SumUp, Bestmile, and Volterra.
‍
It is the optimal outcome of a busy and challenging, yet very rewarding year 2019. Since launching our APIs in February, we’ve been able to engage over 1500 developers testing out our APIs, coming from over 80 countries. But it didn’t stop with testing, and we’re super excited about the results. We’ve got 20+ customers building real-world use cases on the blockchain using Upvest’s technology, most of them traditional fintechs and asset tokenization platforms, such as Exporo and Brickblock.
So what will the money be used? Our challenge is not only building easy-to-use blockchain APIs, but rather a product which needs to fit the regulatory environment, without sacrificing on security or user experience. First, our focus will first be on making existing services as reliable and scalable as possible before extending our solution in the dimensions of tech, security, and legal. The long-term goal is building a more open and inclusive ecosystem to build amazing fintech applications.
‍
In practice, we will focus on extending our great team, which is at the heart of our offering and the product we’ve built so far. With the investment money, we’re now able to make crucial hires, which span across important functionalities. We will get more muscle behind our engineering team to get more speed in development processes, without sacrificing our quality and security. On the business side, we will complement our team with a senior sales and marketing person to help us create this market category. If you are looking for an opportunity in a highly disruptive industry or know someone who is, please check out our current positions.
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We want to thank all our API users, enterprise clients, team members, and investors for the great year of 2019. Your feedback and suggestions are invaluable to us, and we couldn’t build our product without it.
The next year will be very exciting! We can’t wait to share the improved and new features and services we’ve got in planning for you.

Ethereum Mainnet Istanbul Upgrade

2019-12-09T10:19:00.001Z

Despite a last-minute critical update released by Parity before the weekend, the Ethereum mainnet upgrade of "Istanbul" was smooth and it looks like the entire network migrated together this time .

All of our services are operating as expected following the fork.

The next Ethereum network upgrade will be "Muir Glacier", which is due to happen at block 9,200,000 and scheduled to occur on Tue, Dec 31, 2019 around 8:35 AM.

Resyncing on Ethereum Ropsten Istanbul Fork

2019-10-10T12:54:00.001Z

We have decided to proactively re-sync onto the Istanbul fork of the Ethereum Ropsten testnet instead of waiting for the straggling miners to switch over and for that chain to re-take the lead. This is expected to take several hours, until which point balance and transaction updates will not be reliable on our Playground environment.

This does not affect any Live environment users.

Ethereum Ropsten Istanbul Fork Update

2019-10-09T11:27:00.001Z

The recent (and premature) Istanbul fork on the Ethereum Ropsten testnet has caused a bit of mayhem and has resulted in two competing forks so far. The miner-led one (the longer non-Istanbul chain), and the developer-led one (the Istanbul chain).

Upvest is currently still on the longer non-Istanbul chain of Ropsten, so you will find that there will be some discrepancies if comparing blocks/transactions to those listed in other services (e.g. Etherscan) that have switched to follow the Istanbul chain. These changes include things like different block numbers, block transactions, confirmations, etc.

To be clear, none of this impacts the Ethereum mainnet yet, and we will monitor the Istanbul fork situation and provide any updates as necessary.