April 28: Inside Cardstack This Week
CARD Protocol, Card Pay, Cardstack Wallet & NFTs
CARD Protocol
Work is complete on the integration of exchange rate oracles. With this integration, customers and merchants can settle payment transactions at an agreed-upon exchange rate, based on the stablecoin-to-USD price at the moment of the transaction. We anticipate that many types of currency will be used to pay for products and services. While goods will be priced in USD, the customer can pay with any stablecoin that is supported in the CARD Protocol, using a unit called SPEND (§1 SPEND = $0.01 USD). Since stablecoins do fluctuate in price, we need to access a reliable decentralized price feed, so that we can display and charge the customer the correct number of stablecoins for a particular USD value.
Card Pay
The Card Pay web dApp leverages the Boxel workflow system, specifically the action sequence that works across two different wallets — one that accesses the balance on layer 1 (e.g. MetaMask on Ethereum mainnet) and one that accesses layer 2 (xDAI chain and the smart contract wallet infrastructure on that chain). In this workflow, the combination of wallets (depending on which wallet the user uses) needs to be handled gracefully, both when things go right and when something goes wrong. We need to prompt users to reconnect their wallet(s) when a session expires or when there are other types of errors. The team has continued to push updates to the workflow UI components. We are also testing Card Pay with MetaMask and WalletConnect-based wallets, so as to facilitate deposits and withdrawals of stablecoins and other reward tokens through our token bridge.
Cardstack Wallet
The Cardstack wallet requires the use of Gnosis Safe on the xDAI chain to manage prepaid card balances and facilitate gasless transactions for customers. We have successfully instantiated all the supportive services necessary to conduct gasless transactions. A customer does not need to have an additional native token, like ETH or xDAI, to perform a purchase transaction or other on-chain transactions. Instead, the CARD Protocol accepts bridged stablecoins as gas tokens, which means that only one type of token is necessary in the user’s wallet for end-to-end transactions to occur. If users have spent the entirety of their bridged stablecoins, so their stablecoin balance is at 0, we handle this situation by including a small amount of CARD tokens to pay for the xDAI chain fees via the Gnosis relay. We will continue to refine this implementation to make sure that users do not have to worry about having to fund a tiny amount of gas; this way, they can focus on the commercial transactions, like buying and selling, instead of wallet management.
While we get the Card Pay application ready for testnet and subsequently mainnet release, we are working in parallel on product design and protocol specification for the next set of features that will enrich the Cardstack ecosystem. Once we have a fast, cheap, and easy-to-use mobile payment system in place, we want users to be able to buy and sell goods & services using Card Pay as the primary payment method.
NFTs as SKUs
Here’s a teaser for a design project we are doing in collaboration with Flex Dapps in Australia. We are working to create an NFT-based product catalog, where merchants can set prices, discounts, and various criteria (e.g. “only people who hold my token can buy this product”). This will take the current excitement around community tokens and intersect it with the growing popularity of NFTs as stock-keeping units (SKU). NFTs are very flexible. An NFT can represent purely digital goods like JPEGs, a digital ticket that gives you access to real-world events, or even a redemption voucher that allows you to redeem it for a physical product by burning your limited-edition NFT. We have completed the design phase of this product conception. We are now using these mockups to guide the protocol design, so that crypto commerce is supported on the Card Pay protocol. We have already begun development on the protocol, using the Zora protocol as the starting point. We plan to release these capabilities as part of Card Space in Q3.
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