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 September 1, 2022, where he answered various questions from the Cardstack community. He shared progress updates on product development and announced upcoming product launches. He also addressed questions around Cardstack’s strategy, protocol, and marketing efforts.
Strategy
What’s the biggest pain point in Web3 that Cardstack is trying to solve? (8:52)
Web3 is very difficult to enter for a regular person. You have to know how to use MetaMask and wallets and you have to understand crypto as a concept. You have to be a savvy trader and you have to kind of understand the culture and economics. And you have to know the very specific blockchain development tools, and how to use them.
None of these things make a lot of sense to people outside the blockchain industry right now. So our goal is to build a very smooth onramp where you can download a wallet and start interacting immediately, using the wallet as a second-factor or first-factor login application and you’re guided through everything. So this onramping process requires us to not just say, “We’re a dApp provider. We create a dApp that does one thing. Please learn how to use the rest of Web3 and then use Cardstack.” We have to own the whole user experience. That’s why we’re trying to build the protocol and the infrastructure, so that we can go ahead and say, “This is the place where everything makes sense together.”
We plan for Cardstack, especially with the extensibility framework, to be the main way for developers and projects to deliver the onramps to their protocols or their communities as cards. We then distribute those cards in the Card Catalog. But people don’t need to know about the catalog; they just use the wallet, tap on a button, and join a community. That card experience connects them to many ecosystems that are currently much more isolated. No need to learn how to use different dApps with different plugins and wallets. It’s all cohesive. That’s what we are trying to solve — the onramp problem and the cohesive experience problem.
How is Cardstack helping people access the benefits of crypto? (10:55)
If you need to know you’re using crypto, we’ve missed the boat. We believe crypto and Web3 is a technology — the next-generation technology that adds to the web and to the mobile ecosystem.
And the way to do it is to make the features you’re using today faster and easier. For example, when you’re making a stablecoin payment, you wouldn’t think of it as a stablecoin payment. You would just say, “I was able to send something to a contract and it was really fast!” — and you actually signed the transaction via multisig, having two approvals to send funds from your company’s treasury, without having to log into three different dashboards.
The goal is to look at the Web2 use cases — the use cases of tech as it is today — and then translate them to crypto without any friction, so that people are using crypto underneath the experience of Cardstack without knowing it. The benefit of crypto is that it is a new, more decentralized, more egalitarian, and more transparent way of doing business. But it cannot be at the expense of making it more difficult to use. And that’s what we’re focusing on.
Where do you see Cardstack standing 3–5 years from now in terms of users, usability & visibility? (17:33)
These things are correlated: The more usable a product is, the more users you get; the more users you get, the more visibility you have; and the more visibility you have, the more users you get. But the key part is usability.
Right now, our focus is to make sure that the system is usable for users from a mobile wallet point of view, that the framework is usable for developers interacting with users, and that the protocol is easy to use for developers — not just developers who know smart contracts and Solidity, but any JavaScript or even Python developer who is building analytics or data reporting or data science pipelines.
We want those developers to build their own analytics engines and deploy them to our analytics protocol, or to use JavaScript to deploy their cards / UI for a new type of membership joining system, for example. Those types of contributions will make Cardstack the place where the code is being aggregated — specifically the Card Catalog, where users can then access all this software.
But here’s the key: We don’t expect Cardstack to be the only hosting company for all the Cardstack applications, the same way the company behind WordPress is not the only WordPress hosting company. We want the software to be ubiquitous and the catalog to be the canonical one that people submit software to, so that it gets distributed for people to access Web3 features everywhere.
And the people participating in our protocol ecosystem will get a slice of the protocol fees or the user subscription fees. Then they can build their own front end and their own customer onramp. So an ecosystem like WordPress — that is where we see ourselves, and we aim for a symbiotic relationship where users create a market for developers.
It is about the composability and connection this technology creates between things that now exist in different apps. We want to create this fluidity, so you don’t have to use several different dApps and plugins every day. Once we unlock this usability, the visibility and the users will come.
How will Cardstack scale as more users are onboarded? (46:00)
Scalability is about not sharing state. If everybody’s writing to the same database, like Ethereum mainnet, it is very expensive.
Cardstack doesn’t depend on one shared state. We can work on top of multiple chains, even multiple layer-2 chains, so there’s no general scalability challenge. You can render a card as long as the computer is powerful enough to put all the buttons etc. on it. So there’s no natural scalability to Cardstack because we are a web platform, a browser platform, and that’s how it’s scaled.
But as an organization, we’ll start forming a broader community of DAO contributors — for example, people contributing code or running nodes for analytic processes. We’ll use the power of the community and incentives to build a support structure for the users we’ll onboard. This will be done in lockstep with our user growth.
Protocol
What are Cardstack’s plans for the Card Protocol? (14:24)
Initially, the Card Protocol is our analytic protocol. We wanted a protocol that does billing for software. So Cardstack is building a software ecosystem where developers contribute cards; and based on how their cards are being used, they get a compensation like a royalty stream. That allows us to create open-source sustainability.
The Card Protocol has always been about CA (customer acceptance) and RD (revenue distribution). It’s about accepting the customer, accepting the cash coming in. And when the cash is mediated through a protocol, in this case the Card Protocol, it’s much easier to take a percentage and pay it to the people who are building the upstream open-source tools. So the Card Protocol is always about fair income distribution within a thriving ecosystem where the top line revenue comes through the customer cash — when customers subscribe to a SaaS product, make transactions, etc. There is a money flow or value flow through the network.
We will generalize this protocol so it takes any mediated payment and then uses analytics to determine commissions and fair attributions to each participant — whether they wrote the code, provided the data, did the sales, made the calls, invited the people, or created the YouTube video perhaps. But they don’t have to collect 2 cents here and 50 cents there; they can use the claim function (similar to the reward claim function in the wallet) and claim it in bulk.
In the future, we will group all the protocols together (advance, payment, and revenue distribution) under a new protocol family name. We will use our learnings to provide the different components of the workflows as Gnosis Safes: The revenue pool, the fee payment, the capability to split money among DAO members — all those will be Gnosis Safes. You’re always in control of your funds, but we help orchestrate the flow and the cascading of value across these different safes, using the protocol as kind of a router, like a plumbing network.
Will it get easier to acquire prepaid cards? (26:29)
Yes. So far, we’ve been using the crypto-fiat onramp in the Cardstack Wallet. It’s almost like buying crypto with Wyre, which is integrated with Rainbow. What we’re working on now is in-app purchase. So you can actually use the built-in App Store / Play Store capability to buy these tools. Right now, we’re using in-app purchases for profiles, so you’re not buying the Spend or the actual unit first and then buying the profile; instead, you’re buying it directly. That’s where we’re gonna start.
But ultimately, we want to think about these spendable units as in-game points and allow you to buy them the way you would buy points for a game you’re playing. So you’ll be using the in-app purchase capability to buy these spendable units. This means that it will not only get easier to buy prepaid cards; it will actually be integrated into the native app store ecosystem.
What other chains are you planning to support? (28:06)
Supporting one chain allows us to focus all our efforts on building the end-to-end user experience from the wallet to the protocol. Supporting more chains requires us to be able to automate our deployment of all the supporting services necessary.
Multi-chain support is a project we’ve been working on for a few months now. It is about automation, monitoring, tracking your deployments, and dealing with idiosyncrasy between the networks. Our goal is to deploy to all the common EVM networks, including layer-2 chains. We expect to support mainnet, but also popular chains like Polygon, Arbitrum, or Optimism.
However, they all need to support Gnosis Safes. That’s the primitive we use to create the units of account.
To get there, we will need incremental resources to keep all of these blockchains synced and make sure all the monitoring is done in a reasonable way, using a language called Terraform or a toolkit. Once that’s ready, we will roll it out for community feedback.
Why isn’t there an easier way to stake my CARD? (30:36)
One of the reasons we chose to use the bridging mechanism — which is part of the Card Pay network — as a way to stake is that there’s already a safe way and an audited contract. It’s the safest way for us to say, “If you put your token in this particular smart contract on mainnet, it will show up on layer 2 as a CPXD token. The locking mechanism is already in place.”
We’re essentially using that particular smart contract as the first place where you can put your mainnet CARD, so that we can recognize you having done that. It just so happens that, due to the bridging, the process is more expensive than putting the tokens in a normal staking contract on mainnet. But really, it doesn’t matter where you put them. Our Tally protocol just looks at your balance and your activity history, and based on that, you get a certain amount of tokens as a reward for being a part of the community. That’s staking in a nutshell. It doesn’t matter where that activity is; it does matter where we distribute it. Right now, we distribute our token on Gnosis Chain.
Hopefully, in the future, you will be able to select your preferred chain for distribution (one of the chains where the protocol is deployed), which could be mainnet too — then you would have to pay higher gas fees to claim your rewards, but you would no longer need the bridging process.
What is off-chain compute and why does it matter for the larger Web3 space? (33:38)
Off-chain compute is how we do staking. We look at the on-chain history and do an off-chain compute — so it’s not using Solidity, it’s just data science code. We look at the computations and group them like an Excel operation, and then decide what the output is. We cut a file and sign a Merkle root, so we can use the blockchain to enforce and validate it.
That off-chain compute infrastructure is completely flexible for extensions. So people can create their own staking model, reward model, airdrop model, or NFT gating model. For example, you could set it up so that users only get access if they own a particular token for a certain number of days; or that they get minting rights if they hold this token, participate in the DAO, and have voted at least once. That’s very complicated logic to write in Solidity.
Our off-chain compute infrastructure can compute that for you. You’ll have to write your data (e.g. “I depend on these data sets, this smart contract, and these NFT collections”) and then the results get written on one or more chains, so you can check them on-chain. That capability is the first time that data science / AI / machine learning can become the programming language for Web3. This is a big deal!
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 strategy- and protocol-related questions Chris Tse answered in the video above. Part 2 covers questions around Cardstack’s products and marketing efforts.
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