Unbeknownst to many, we’ve spent the last few months contacting major exchanges to educate them around the importance of supporting smart contracts, ‘meta coins,’ DAOs and other type of digital assets on the Ethereum Network. Today we are proud to announce the results of this work.

Kraken, Gatecoin, Bity, ShapeShift and Bittrex are all going to support the open source Standard DAO Framework and have all added varying levels of support for a data field in their Ethereum transactions. This means it’s now possible for users of these exchanges to call functions within smart contracts — in other words, being able to create DAO tokens and interact with DAOs straight from the interface of the exchanges themselves.

It doesn’t look like much, but this ‘Data’ field is going to make a world of difference. (Source: Kraken)

Kraken​ — now has a generic data field — open to interact with anything on the Ethereum blockchain.

​Gatecoin​ — has a generic datafield which can be setup using their APIs (this is available on a DAO per DAO basis)

​Bity​ — has implemented a specific workflow for the upcoming DAO we’ll submit a proposal to, and you’ll be able to create DAO tokens from the Bity site itself.

​ShapeShift​ — despite their recent restructuring, ShapeShift have been superstars, and attached a special API-Key to their workflow, which enables a targetAddress to be used to call the createTokenProxy() function.

Here’s a really cool feature of the DAO Creation module we built and open sourced 100%: prospective DAO Token Holders are able to Create DAO tokens without a pre-existing Ethereum account, meaning they will be able to just directly Create and manage their DAO Tokens on an exchange.

Both Gatecoin and Bittrex are ​implementing this function, and are intending to make ‘The’ DAO tokens available for trade as soon as possible.

For those paying attention, this means using the Standard DAO Framework enables anyone wanting to Create a DAO the ability to accept pretty much any digital or fiat currency, both within and outside the United States, including New York State residents as Bittrex holds a Bitlicense.

While other digital currencies are limited to trade only, Ethereum demarcates itself by being programmable. This small but crucial upgrade demonstrates the commitment of these exchanges to lead the charge when it comes to implementing the necessary features to support the future of Ethereum Ðapps.

We’d be delighted to help other exchanges implement this feature — simply ping us at [email protected].