August 4: Inside Cardstack This Week
Card Pay’s Early Access Program & Purchasing using the Card Wallet app
Update on Card Pay’s Early Access Program
This week, we completed the first wave of beta user testing and obtained valuable feedback from the Early Access Program participants. This feedback allows us to not only identify and prioritize bug fixes but also further develop the onboarding workflow during both the testing program and our eventual public launch.
One of our key improvements involved clarifying the Card Wallet as a primarily Layer 2 wallet that can be used by customers and merchants as a way to make payments and earn funds in conjunction with the Card Pay network. While Card Wallet retains many Layer 1 capabilities that allow us to be a competent replacement for wallets such as MetaMask, we are currently suggesting that beta testers use MetaMask as their Layer 1 wallet, especially when onboarding pre-existing tokens like DAI onto the Layer 1 — Layer 2 bridge.
We expect most token suppliers to hold their Layer 1 tokens on MetaMask because of its ubiquity within DeFi applications on mainnet. Once the suppliers bridge the tokens and issue the prepaid card, they can then use the Card Wallet for day-to-day transactions.
Current Focus of Card Pay Beta
The current phase of the beta is focused on the workflow of token suppliers and prepaid Card issuers. While these are the most complicated workflows from a technological perspective, it is great to see many beta testers successfully navigate and complete the testing tasks that allow us to validate the cross-chain operations of our smart contracts, developer SDKs, web-based dApp and mobile wallet.
Once we solidify those aspects of the Card Pay protocol family, we will roll out merchant and customer features that allow users to conduct actual stablecoin payments in a low fee environment. These capabilities have already been tested and audited; we are just enabling certain screens within the dApp and the mobile wallet in order to let testers perform the roles of merchants and customers using the prepaid card and bridged tokens.
Purchasing using Card Wallet
We understand that most customers wanting to buy products using our protocol such as limited edition goods (Unisocks or “Card shirts”), NFTs, and DAO memberships are not likely to bridge their own tokens. Instead, we would like them to use Apple Pay to purchase a prepaid card directly within the Card Wallet app “without having to visit Coinbase,” scan one QR code from a merchant’s website “hosted on Card Space,” and complete the transaction using their prepaid card balance.
Moreover, we are pleased to announce that we have successfully integrated the Apple Pay fiat on-ramp with our on-ramp vendor Wyre. This mainnet integration allows for the delivery of ETH and DAI to the user’s mainnet address.
Development work has begun to automate the Layer 1 and Layer 2 bridging so that customers do not need to bridge their own tokens from Layer 1 to Layer 2. Instead, they can simply leverage our Layer 2 meta transaction relays to obtain the prepaid card almost immediately after a successful payment through Apple Pay.
Once we have this integration in place, we will be ready to test this end-to-end purchase workflow on our Layer 2 network with a broader group of users who have less crypto / DeFi experience.
Card Pay’s Early Access Program is still open for applicants
The Card Pay Early Access program is still running! If you have not signed up and would like to be one of our testers, please complete this survey.
These details will significantly help us understand our current user base to provide a more focused future feature development and prioritization.
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