Card Pay: Fast, Cheap, Easy

A demo of Cardstack’s payment and withdrawal workflows

Cardstack Team

Published in

Cardstack

5 min readOct 8, 2021

“Cardstack is positioned as the experience layer of Web3.”
— Chris Tse, Cardstack Founder

At Cardstack, we are developing a cohesive UX, so that users can access Web3 without having to deal with the frustrations of high gas fees, slow transactions, or other blockchain-related issues. How exactly? Let’s begin answering this question by taking a look at the three project layers that compose Cardstack.

We are three projects in one:

Card Wallet: A consumer-focused Web3 wallet for iOS & Android.
Cardstack Environment: A software composability framework and no-code tool based on JavaScript.
Card Pay, Card Space, Card Membership: A DeFi payment and reward protocol built on Ethereum. Card Pay is a payment protocol, while Card Space allows users to create their own decentralized spaces, like a DeFi version of WordPress or Squarespace. Card Membership uses on- and off-chain record keeping to identify and reward active participation of community members.

“The first step is to provide fast, easy, and cheap payments.”
— Chris Tse, Cardstack Founder

Card Pay remedies the problem of high transactional fees by operating on layer 2. This is made possible through our Card Bridge technology that bridges tokens between layer 1 and 2. Since Card Wallet is optimized for layer 2, it offers gasless transactions, and our streamlined confirmation screens further enhance our seamless transactional interface. Thus, Card Pay provides a smooth and cheap payment system to the Web3 world.

This payment system is integrated with Card Space, resulting in a combination that allows for decentralized web hosting and easy transactions. Users who sign up for Card Pay and use Card Wallet as a customer payment tool can create their own storefronts and display their own media information. Ultimately, this system will allow customers to experience a wallet-based checkout workflow that’s easier to use than the current modes of commerce within Web3.

Here’s how this workflow engine operates:

The core infrastructure of Card Pay offers a variety of features and uses, many of which are highlighted in the bullets above. Via workflows, users can initiate token bridging from mainnet to layer 2 and issue prepaid cards that contain pre-packaged balances. They can set up merchant accounts that act as safes, which allow them to withdraw their earnings to mainnet (this process is discussed in our demo below). Moreover, users can reserve names for their Card Spaces in order to start their memberships.

Workflow Demos

Here is a demo of our customer-to-merchant payment workflow:

Here is a demo of our merchant withdrawal workflow:

These demos showcase a variety of different features and integrations:

A secure smart contract wallet for prepaid cards and merchant accounts powered by Gnosis Safe
Low-cost side chains like xDai with capabilities for bridging to mainnet
A built-in fiat on-ramp integrated with Apple Pay
Fair currency exchange rates through Chainlink’s price feeds
Mobile-optimized wallet interactions via WalletConnect
Easy NFT minting & selling processes through Zora

Buying a prepaid card on L2

The Card Wallet allows users to choose a denomination for their prepaid card, purchase the prepaid card through Apple Pay, and confirm the purchase with their Face ID. This instantly generates a stablecoin balance for them to spend on layer 2.

This means that, once users buy a prepaid card in the Card Wallet mobile app, they can begin spending money and interacting with the cryptosphere immediately.

Online tipping / donation

Card Space allows users to add donation modules that contain customizable QR payment codes to their spaces. They simply drag a donation module into Card Space, select the preferred payment amounts for donations, and then this process creates the QR codes for supporters. This feature is completely noncustodial, so users do not have to wait for an intermediary to clear transactions; the exchange will travel straight from a user’s wallet to the blockchain to the recipient’s wallet.

Are these features ready for daily use?

At 95% feature complete, we are almost ready to launch Card Pay. The iOS wallet and web dApp are stable enough for daily use, and the smart contracts undergirding our processes have passed two rounds of security audits. The iOS version will ship first, and Android will follow soon after.

While Card Pay is the first tool to be shipped, we are working on Card Space and Card Catalog concurrently in order to complete the virtuous cycle.