1. App-like creation & curation tools
The Cardstack application framework
The Cardstack application framework is about building an app — or about helping a developer figure out how to build an app. It’s like we’re trying to build a new type of building with a new type of material (like steel beams, carbon fiber, nanotubes). We’re building applications in a new way. And in order to know that our building technique, using the card-based approach, works, we have to build a test application on top of our framework.
To that end, we have built an app in the decentralized finance/cryptocurrency space — an asset management system called Card Folio. We have built a data application for the music industry — the dotBC Registry. We have built a community content management system — an app we call Card Board. And we have built 4 Edges, which is a card browser, allowing you to look at the cards or to queue them to be sent to other people in a more generic use case; and any app can tap into it. These test apps prove that our application framework is working. And the more we build these kinds of apps, the more we validate the framework.
Once our framework is solid and we have a standard set of tools people can use — so they know how to send a message, how to create an article, etc. — we hope that they will expand it; similarly to how you can create a basic block in WordPress, then people add plugins to it, thereby making it a richer system.
2. Network & relationship building tools
Gitchain
Gitchain is one of the most important aspects of the second part of Cardstack’s architecture. It is about enabling people — the people who build on top of the Cardstack application framework — to use the card concept in order to build networks with each other.
It is a general-purpose protocol for moving things around. And everything we have designed has been sitting on top of Git. Almost everything in Card Folio or Card Board — like your wallet, portfolio, article, and images — is encoded in Git. It makes sense that the syndication and synchronization are done in a standard way. Therefore, we can use Gitchain as the primary way to build this next-generation network. In the future, we will work on capabilities like distributing leads to multiple people; for instance, so that Gitchain only distributes something to members of a certain network, like a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
Gitchain will also be useful to build applications for people who are not in the decentralized finance space. There are numerous use cases for which Gitchain will be appropriate. Making Gitchain part of our infrastructure will allow us to build end-user-friendly applications, tapping into the spirit of the open Web, and allowing us to connect the blockchain vision to the reality of what people aim to do every day.
3. Revenue model & value distribution
The CARD Token, CLUTCH, Card Key, and Tally
Most people in the cryptocurrency or blockchain space are focused on the revenue model and the value distribution in the ecosystem — independent of application and network building. We believe that, from e-commerce to CRM to lead generation to customer service, there are countless types of applications that would benefit from the global consensus and the distributed protocol that blockchain can provide.
Yet, many people who would use a Web 3.0 application, which is backed by a blockchain, have never owned a token. Still, they may want to be able to put data on the blockchain. And they want to be able to pay the fee, ensuring that their transaction doesn’t fail. But they have never heard of gwei or gas.
That’s where the CARD Token comes in: Say you have a USD $5 balance on your card. When you are putting something on Gitchain, you need to provide 10 cents worth of gas, to register and reserve your little space in the global ledger of Ethereum — to make sure that your content or your data set has a record in this global ledger. So, you can either find a way to buy 10 cents worth of gas or you can say, “whoever is willing to honor this transaction can deduct 10 cents from my balance, from my prepaid card. And then, the network will pay you 11 or 12 cents.”
That is what is missing in the blockchain space: What about utility? What about users who want to use it without ever seeing it; who want a balance they can buy with a credit card, or subscribe on a monthly basis? Then, that subscription or prepaid value is distributed evenly, as used, with trust. This way, someone can help these users put something on Gitchain or another file storage network without them having to touch the token. And that’s very different from saying, “I want to hold the token and look at it.” It’s about paying the fees across the network. We see the CARD Token as universal fuel — triggering the correct transaction, so you can do everything you want to do.
The CLUTCH mechanism is a way for you to purchase this prepaid usage credit, using a credit card. Now, you can’t trade these tokens; you can only consume them by giving them back to the network — “handing them over”, so that the network can fulfill your request to do a set of operations on chain for you. It should make sense why CLUTCH is short for Conditionally Locked Until Token is Contractually Handed-over.
You can even use this balance to pay some other trusted parties (note: plural) on the network to manage your keys and sign transactions for you. Card Key is our way of signing transactions. The signature process becomes as easy as signing into a website, without having to worry about hardware wallets and recovery phrases. Behind this simplicity is some of the most advanced cryptography in use today, so that your keys remain yours and are kept safe.
The Tally Protocol is all about starting simple — looking at what transaction has happened, who has paid for whose gas — and then using the Cardstack Hub as the computation to say, “you should give this portion of the money that has been deducted from people’s balances to this person, because he has facilitated 4,000 transactions last month”. This requires someone to perform analytics on the underlying on-chain data. That’s what Card Folio, running on Cardstack Hub, does behind the scenes; it correlates and summarizes on-chain data and off-chain statistics continuously. That is the runtime we are using to power the first deployment of Tally.
In the future, Tally can be augmented beyond this basic counting and aggregation capability, to start making some judgment calls regarding portion size. For example, is there a bonus or penalty based on good or bad behavior, latency, speed, or reliability? That is when machine learning meets data mining meets block mining. Expect more use of GPUs.
So that’s the idea: We take the pool of value, which comes from users who are actually paying to use this blockchain-backed software, and give it back to not only the people providing the service — but to the developers, designers, and makers who make this experience possible, by spending time and energy to create the cards, the UI, the widgets, and the themes that make your content or your application successful.
Learn More
- Introducing Gitchain: Cardstack’s Protocol for Syncing Application States
- The Tally Protocol: Scaling Ethereum With Untapped GPU Power
- Cardstack’s Card Folio App: Community Demo
- Cardstack White Paper, Reward Paper, and Tokens & Contracts
Join our Discord channel and star Cardstack on GitHub to follow updates on the Cardstack framework, Gitchain, and a suite of standard cards.
