Digital assets exchange Uphold delivered its promise by adding support for Ether on its platform, which followed the support for Litecoin rolled out in May.

Jorge Pereira, Executive Vice President, Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Uphold, said earlier that the decision to support these two blockchain-based currencies was driven by their growing popularity in the developer and open source communities, financial traders and enthusiasts.

In addition, bitcoin payroll startup Bitwage teamed up with Uphold to offer its users the option to receive payroll payments in Ether.

Jonathan Chester, President of Bitwage, and Jorge Periera spoke to EconoTimes about the latest announcements, challenges faced and more:

1. Uphold has recently added support for Ether on its platform, following the announcement made in March. Can you tell us if there was any major setback or difficulties you faced during this period? Did Uphold get in touch with the Ethereum team?

Jorge Pereira: Integration of Ether went ahead smoothly, and we didn't see the need to engage with the Ethereum team at this stage, although members of our staff are quite involved in the community. There were a few challenges related to how Ethereum works differently from other blockchains, namely the fact that its transactions maintain an on-ledger balance, the use of a single input and output per transaction or the fact we Ether supports up to 18 decimal places. Given the versatility of our infrastructure however, these were all solved within a couple weeks.

2. Are there any plans to add The DAO tokens or any other cryptocurrency to the platform?

Jorge Pereira: We have no immediate plans to add more cryptocurrencies or tokens, but we'll continue to monitor this space and consider adding support for any form of value that shows promise due to its particular focus, or that brings clear value to our members.

3. Leveraging Uphold’s support for Ether, Bitwage is allowing workers to enter the world of decentralized autonomous organizations through their paycheck. Would you like to tell us more about it? How long has this been in the works?

Jonathan Chester: Ethereum is an exciting new technology with the potential to completely disrupt the way companies and enterprises are run.  While bitcoin is still the leader from a reserve currency and payment rail perspective, as the most valuable, liquid and secure blockchain, ethereum is poised to be the leading blockchain in the smart contracts realm.  This can be seen through the $150m raise of the first decentralized autonomous organizations, or The DAO, built off of the ethereum blockchain.  By receiving a wage in Ether, Bitwage and Uphold are enabling users to have one of the easiest ways to become a part of the smart contract revolution without directly investing in or starting a smart contract company.