Ask Me Anything — Part 1
#CardstackAMA: Behind the scenes of the Cardstack Project
Chris Tse, Founding Director of the Cardstack Project, hosted an AMA session on April 12, 2021, where he answered various questions from the Cardstack community. He spoke about the products to be launched this year and the benefits they bring to users & developers. He also addressed questions around Cardstack’s strategy, crypto aspects, and the technology behind the project, among many other topics.
There is a lot of innovation at Cardstack, but which innovation makes you say, “Wow! We got it!”?
Cardstack is a full-stack framework, but we don’t do the whole stack at a time. Our “wow” moment comes when different parts of our architecture line up; when you click a button and everything goes all the way through the full stack — whether it is the API, the part that talks to the blockchain, or the part that talks to our indexer and databases.
There was a moment when we connected the Boxel design system — as we were working on a media registry application that allows you to construct new types of media records — and it was able to go all the way through the stack and write this out in a git-backed blockchain instance. That was when we knew: We got it. This architecture, if extended, would allow us to extend and support all different types of schema and content. And with that capability, we also know what to work on to improve performances and usability for developers.
What will be the driving factor for people to use Card Pay, compared to the other hundreds of wallets that exist in the market?
Card Pay is the first wallet to focus on day-to-day payments. Because of Bitcoin, most wallets in the cryptocurrency space are focused on HODL or investment use cases, or charting and figuring out your balance and portfolio.
Our goal is to have you load up a prepaid card and figure out which merchant to pay — almost like WeChat Pay or Alipay. There are very few wallets that are oriented that way. Even though Cardstack has the same kind of cryptographical mechanism and Web3 hooks as some of the Ethereum wallets, we’re the only one focused on consumer onboarding, rather than consumers as investors.
Why will creators join the Cardstack ecosystem to build and host their own content, instead of joining big platforms like Medium, TikTok, etc?
Creators are already using Medium, TikTok, and Twitter to build their audiences, and they have a lot of success. The reason why creators are looking at crypto is one word: incentives.
Crypto offers incentives like being able to sell an NFT to pay for a whole year of work. It offers the ability to use digital scarcity as a way to differentiate a random person, who just liked your post because it showed up on a newsfeed, from someone who has been following you for a long time and who has contributed great things to your community. You want to reward those loyal followers, you want to recognize them. Crypto — both fungible and non-functional tokens, like community tokens or membership badges — is a great way to do that.
Cardstack is a Web3 platform that gives tools to creators which allow them to work with these kinds of incentives (crypto, DAOs, NFTs). That is not something you will get from Medium. The incentives that exist in this experimentation with crypto are something we want to commodify and make readily available within the Cardstack platform. This is what makes the Cardstack ecosystem unique.
How is Cardstack different from WordPress and plugins?
The main difference is that we do Web3, while WordPress does not do Web3.
But we really love the way WordPress won. When WordPress came to the market, there were a lot of content management systems (CMS). Some of them were proprietary, costing thousands of dollars to license; some of them were like smaller units. WordPress, built on the conventional language at the time (PHP/MySQL), was able to create a whole ecosystem of plugins, where new modules and new capabilities got formed in this kind of gallery, allowing people to build increasingly functional sites with a common core.
We want to do the same thing, providing an open-source alternative to some of these new platforms. Even when it comes to Web3 and NFT platforms, very few of them are open-source. Most of them have proprietary software VC backing and aren’t very permissive — in contrast to the way WordPress started, as a true open-source project.
Cardstack is a true open-source project as well. We are based on JavaScript and Postgres (which is this generation’s PHP/MySQL). We want to be able to build a plugin ecosystem called the Card Catalog, so people can not only use Cardstack off-the-shelf — by using Card Space as a hosting service, similar to how you can use wordpress.com as a hosting service — but they can also customize their own site and host it themselves.
So, Cardstack is actually very similar to WordPress, but we do it for Web3.
How will marketing work when I decide to promote something I’m offering as a service/product on my own Card Space?
We believe that people will form secondary communities in Web3. Users will have their own space/profile page, but they can join other communities as well. So, your content will get syndicated with other people’s content if they let you into their community. It will be like creating your own newsletter and then joining a group of writers to create a newsletter together. Once you do that, your content is mixed together. This is one way you can get your content distributed.
Because an article/video card in your Card Space is of the same type as the article/video cards in other people’s spaces, it’s very easy to move that card between different sites. They’re all drawn from the same software so that they are compatible at the API and template layer.
Do you plan to release official guides/tutorials for the Card Space builder?
Tutorials and education are the best way to get people to use any software. Therefore, apart from our own official guides and tutorials, the idea is to foster a community of teachers. So much software exists in the world, but people don’t know how to use it until they find a YouTube video about it. That’s why Cardstack would love to get creators involved, so they can teach users how to use Card Space. It’s really about education, enablement, imagination, and inspiration.
Have you decided on your pricing structure for the Card Space membership and additional cards?
We haven’t decided exactly what the pricing will be, but note that we are competing with SaaS — we’re not competing with other blockchains. Right now, it costs about $80 to do a blockchain transaction of any meaningful sort. That’s too expensive. When people are thinking about subscriptions to Squarespace or Wix, they’re thinking about prices of $5 to $10. So, we need to start at the base level; and to the degree that we’re using tokens, they will be converted accordingly.
Which services will be paid, and which will be available for free?
Free service always has a price tag — an asterisk attached, asking, “Who is paying for this?” That is not necessarily a good thing. Eventually, you have to monetize, which leads to ads and tracking people.
So, the way we do this is that services are always paid. But users who join the Cardstack network early on will be given a reward card or a prepaid card to start with, which has a balance of CARD tokens or maybe even stablecoins that they can use to pay for products and services. Note that, if you use CARD tokens for your transactions, the value of your balance may go up or down, but the services will be priced in USD or stablecoins, so that the prices stay the same.
The idea is that this is a shared infrastructure. We all have to pay a little bit to keep it going — whether that’s for the blockchain part of the hosting part. However, we are for a free-trial period, where people can try it out; and once you say, “Hey, this is useful to me”, you help maintain this network — either through transaction fees or through a monthly subscription — because that economic value keeps the ecosystem going.
Why would you use Cardstack for collaboration if companies already use Google Drive?
People use Google Drive to share contracts and other files, so as to collaborate with each other. But when you’re done with the collaboration or the deal, what do you do? You email that person, e.g. to send them an invoice, and they use some other system to pay it. Platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox are very static. You can use them to share Word documents, PDFs, and other files, but that is it.
In contrast, collaboration on Cardstack has transaction capabilities. We know we can pay people. We can mark that something has been submitted and you can’t take it back, because it’s written on the blockchain. If you want to adjust the terms of a deal, you can use the collaboration tool to figure out what the terms are; and when you’re done, the button you click and the Face ID you confirm with — that is actually the transaction. You can’t do that with Google Drive, which doesn’t have Google Pay built-in.
That is the exciting thing about collaboration on a system that is built for transactions.
Why would you use Cardstack for social purposes if people already have Instagram?
People use Instagram to find and grow their audience. Cardstack is about building a deeper relationship with the people you have brought into your community. Basically, Instagram is like a billboard to get people in, while Cardstack is the place where you build relationships and business partnerships with them.
On Instagram, things happen very fast and engagement spreads really quickly. But if you want to make a deal, it takes two weeks, because you have to move the conversation to DMs, Zoom calls, etc. With Cardstack as a SaaS tool for the business side of things, such business deals can happen at the same speed as you’re growing your audience on Instagram.
In other words: Social media creates a funnel for building deeper relationships, but the money is made on Cardstack.
Can I still use cards if I don’t want to charge users directly, but monetize through ads?
Yes, you can make a Web page that does not charge anything. You can simply use Card Space as hosting for content, tools, or even lead generation forms.
As for ads, we don’t like intrusive ads that suck in a lot of user profiles. So, our idea is that promotional units will also be cards, which go through a certain process to make sure that they’re not stealing data. Once they’re in the Card Catalog, you can just add those modules to your space.
The type of advertisement we are most excited about is the concept of a group of people or sites, who decide to come together to build a set of promos, which that network can share. Those networks are not focused on listening to the users’ clicks to figure out what’s relevant. And we can build a mechanism to make this happen, to enable those kinds of network-based promotional modules that are shared across multiple sites.
Can I make and sell my first NFT on Cardstack?
People are still thinking very much about NFTs being this special thing, but we believe that NFT is just a new stock-keeping unit (SKU) of media or digital objects. And since we want you to be able to sell anything on Cardstack and Card Pay, one of those things could have an ownership history, which essentially makes it an NFT.
NFTs have many components. The most interesting one is the permission you get when you buy a particular NFT. If you buy this little image, what do you get? Do you get access to a concert, one hour of time with your favourite creator, or do you get the next drop earlier than others? Those are the things we want to enable. Our approach is closer to the commerce concept and less about art collections. We want to commodify the tools for NFTs, so that people can be creative about what kinds of things in the real world they can emulate with this basic ownership history.
Will Cardstack be the next unicorn? How will Cardstack rise quickly and handle market share, as markets are occupied by new projects?
We are building tools. We are the unicorn — not because we are some mythical creature, but because we have the most useful tools that are the easiest to integrate. That’s where we want to start. If other people see that this is the way to get into Web3, it can grow really fast. As people get ready for Web3, looking for alternatives, they will see that this Web3 is very user-friendly, that the wallet is even better than single sign-on using your phone or six-digit codes as two-factor authentication. That is how the size of the Web3 market can become at least five times the size of the Web2 market — just because of the tech progression and the way tech permeates more of the digital landscape.
Does your marketing begin once all products have been released or will you market consecutively?
It will happen consecutively. We’re already having a market conversation about Card Pay, talking about what this product can and cannot do. When we get to Card Space, we will announce things that are more about decentralized storage and other things related to that.
Could you name a few companies Cardstack is working with?
We’ve spent about one to two years really validating our technology. We worked with one of the top three labels to figure out their metadata and asset acquisition strategy. We used that opportunity to test our workflow system and our way of dealing with data entry, including nested data entry. We were also a finalist to work with one of the major travel associations on thinking about mileage redemption between airlines, which allowed us to inject our understanding of the way public blockchains work. We also worked in POC form with a few international banks that were looking into crypto custody. We thought a lot about how to get information from the blockchain and how to get internal approvals via multi-signature.
Now, we’re bringing everything we’ve learned into our products. What we’ve learned about loyalty points is now part of the Card Pay system. What we’ve learned about custody is the reason we’re using a multisig wallet, so that we can bring those kinds of security, gating, and approval workflows into the public network.
As for the media registry, we believe that the best media that is going to be the most valuable and culturally relevant has not been created yet. Let’s create the tools that allow creators to come in and make new content. Instead of just looking at music that was recorded in the 70s, let’s look at what the new creative forms are. That’s what we’re focusing on in the Cardstack framework.
To bootstrap Card Space and Card Catalog, do you have any enterprise partnerships for delivering SaaS?
The partnerships we are pursuing right now are largely in the Web3 space. There is some usefulness in connecting with existing SaaS products (maybe connecting with Stripe for a certain type of credit card payment), but this is a whole new world.
Web3 is fundamentally changing the business model. Even some of the enterprises that want to go into enterprise blockchain feel uncomfortable with the fact that musicians and audiences, for example, can connect directly with each other in Web3. They ask themselves where the value will come from, what their role will be.
Web3 is more disruptive even than a platform where you’re using a website to connect. So, most of the partnerships we will see will be with Web3 projects that are building replacements for existing protocols. We will be a decentralized aggregator of SaaS. We will create a first-party service, and then the partnerships will be with hosting companies that want to host our platform instead of WordPress.
Learn More
If you missed the live stream of the AMA, you can watch Chris Tse answer the questions above and many more in this video:
This article is Part 1 of our AMA series, focusing on the product-related questions Chris Tse answered in the video above. Part 2 will cover questions around the crypto and technological aspects of the Cardstack Project.
To get all our latest updates, sign up for our newsletter on cardstack.com, star Cardstack on GitHub, and join our Discord channel or our Telegram group and announcement channel.
