April 21: Inside Cardstack This Week
Developments on Card Pay, Card Compiler & the Web UI
Card Pay
As part of the Card Pay project, we want to ensure that there are products you can purchase on layer 2, so that we can complete the payment loop from customer payments to merchant withdrawals and product deliveries. We anticipate that Card Pay will be used for online, crypto, physical, as well as ephemeral goods and services. The easiest place to start is simple NFTs, which represent digital objects.
The completion of this ERC-721 aspect is now part of our work on the CARD Protocol. The aim is to bridge ERC-721 tokens between layer 1 and layer 2, so that the code can support the minting of NFTs (which represent products) on the xDAI chain. Once purchased, customers can bridge their NFTs back to layer-1 marketplaces like Opensea.
When Card Pay is launched, you will be able to mint, price, collect, and bridge NFTs with your stablecoin-backed balance in your Cardstack wallet. This low-cost minting service provides more access to the NFT space than the current mainnet-based approach. Since our tools are 100% compatible with WalletConnect and ERC-721, there is no need to learn another blockchain technology or have goods locked behind custodial wallets, which cannot fully participate in the rich Ethereum ecosystem.
In preparation for the launch of the smart-contract portion of the protocol, we have successfully automated all the deployment of necessary services using Terraform. We have also made many of the contracts upgradeable, using the best practices recommended by the OpenZeppelin project, so that new capabilities and functionalities can be added to our protocol without interrupting the customers’ and merchants’ usage of the network.
Web UI
On the Web UI front, we are working through the edge cases to ensure that our thread-based workflow model can support the very involved process of bridging tokens and setting up smart-contract wallet / multisig accounts, which lead to the issuance of prepaid cards to customer wallets. We are simultaneously adding new design system components to the Boxel repository and leveraging those components immediately in an end-to-end test — involving all the Web3 APIs — in a live app. That work will continue until the remainder of the workflows is completed.
Card Compiler
On the card compiler front, we continue to port the capability of nested cards — which is very important for the synthesis of data about assets — into the new (V3) version of the Cardstack Hub. This work is done in the main monorepo. It is done on an iterative basis, so we can strive to reduce the number of lines of code that are necessary to express all the compositional concepts needed to support all of our upcoming products — including Card Space, Card Catalog, and Card Membership. Card Pay does not depend on this new compiler, as it uses mostly Web3 APIs directly; Card Pay is only dependent on the Boxel design system, which is ready for deployment.
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