April 13: Inside Cardstack This Week

Card Reward Protocol, Card Wallet & fireside chat with Uphold

Card Reward Protocol

The Cardstack team has completed the first deployment of the Card Reward Protocol, an off-chain computation protocol that uses Merkle proofs to govern on-chain distribution. As an initial live use case, we are using this new protocol to distribute rewards to participants of the Card Pay and Card Wallet early access program. The activity history of the beta testers is extracted from on-chain transaction records and processed using a Python-based analytic pipeline, which also generates individual claims that can be submitted for on-chain redemption.

This mechanism is designed to be open-ended, which means that it can support reward programs from third parties that have their own tokens ready to be distributed based on other analyses of on-chain data.

To make it easy for users to see their rewards — which requires access to off-chain calculation results — we added features in Card Wallet that synthesize these off-chain data sets.

We also built a one-click action that allows users to submit an on-chain transaction to claim the rewards they have earned. Users of Card Wallet will be able to do this entirely from their mobile phone.

We will develop this Card Reward system for recurring distribution, so that ongoing activity from our users will continue to be rewarded periodically.

The inclusion of the reward capability in the wallet marks an important milestone in the Card Wallet development process, as it completes the payment-to-rewards cycle at the root of the Card Pay vision. As a next step, we want Card Wallet to become a general-purpose wallet that can be used to interact with popular protocols on various Ethereum-compatible layer-1 and layer-2 chains.

Card Wallet

Our product design team has been redesigning Card Wallet, so that users can create a primary persona represented by their card.xyz user name and use the wallet as a primary smart contract wallet to interact with Web3 applications. Cardstack-specific protocols like Card Pay and Card Rewards will be supported, but also popular protocols like DEXs, staking services, and other marketplace protocols. This way, the smooth onboarding that Cardstack has pioneered and the streamlined QR code-based experience that we have launched can become the new standards of usability in the wallet space.

We will also incorporate our Boxel Design System more deeply into the mobile app by leveraging animations and motion primitives that can connect various user actions and asset relationships in spatial and physical ways.

Stay tuned for more updates on the second version of Card Wallet from our mobile team!

Upcoming Fireside Chat

Tomorrow, we will host our weekly fireside chat with Cardstack’s Founding Director, Chris Tse. This time, he will be chatting with Uphold’s Head of Blockchain Research, Dr. Martin Hiesboeck.

Register here.

Chris Tse and Martin Hiesboeck will discuss…

• the growth of the Web3 ecosystem over the past couple of years,
• what institutional and state interest in crypto means for Web3,
• the role of data science in building dApps and DAOs and the overall growth of the space,
• the technological shift to Web3 and the future of the Internet, and
• what’s next for Uphold in 2022 and beyond.

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