Cardstack to Integrate Chainlink Price Feeds for Secure Exchange Rates
Bringing decentralized price feed oracles into Card Pay
Cardstack is proud to announce an upcoming integration for Card Pay — a consumer-facing crypto payment and reward platform — revolving around the use of Chainlink’s market-leading decentralized oracle network. Cardstack will use Chainlink Price Feeds to establish accurate and tamper-proof exchange rates on our platform, beginning on the xDAI chain, but with a planned expansion to other blockchains and layer-2 solutions.
Most DeFi price feeds today are used for trading and financial product use cases, focusing on the needs of investors, token holders, or market makers. Yet, as crypto gains more mainstream attention, especially due to the many scalability solutions being made possible by layer 2 and other blockchain innovations, payment use cases are becoming increasingly important.
That is why Cardstack has developed a multi-party payment protocol. Card Pay is being built as part of the Cardstack suite of decentralized SaaS, supporting both prepaid cards and reward cards for making purchases and earning reward tokens in the network. The Card Pay protocol taps into the composability of DeFi, including the use of stablecoins as a medium of exchange and Web3 wallets as the user interface for viewing balances and authorizing payments. Customers can use the dedicated mobile app to connect with merchants easily, simply by scanning a QR code (powered by WalletConnect) and confirming transactions via Face ID or Touch ID.
Exchange rates are extremely important in payment use cases, as they ensure that customers and merchants are able to find a path from the token the customer holds to the currencies the merchant accepts. The Chainlink oracle network provides many types of exchange rates — from native tokens like ETH to stablecoins like DAI and fiat currencies like USD, as well as emerging community and governance tokens. Used in conjunction with decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, Chainlink enables us to provide seamless one-click payments from the customer’s wallet. The latest Chainlink price feed update will be used to calculate the right amount of tokens to transfer from the customer to the merchant, without requiring a separate step to swap before the payment can be processed.
Chainlink is the most-used decentralized oracle solution in DeFi and across blockchains, already securing billions of dollars in value. Chainlink Price Feeds provide a multitude of time-tested design features that not only ensure accurate exchange rates, but provide robust protection against unexpected events. Some of those features include:
- High-Quality Data — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators like BraveNewCoin and Kaiko, leading to price data aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned from outliers and wash trading. This generates accurate global market prices that are resistant to API downtime, flash crash outliers, and data manipulation attacks like flash loans.
- Secure Node Operators — Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by independent, security-reviewed, and Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading blockchain DevOps teams, data providers, and traditional enterprises. Chainlink nodes have a strong track record for reliability, even during extreme network conditions.
- Decentralized Network — Chainlink Price Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and oracle network levels, generating strong protections against downtime and tampering by either the data provider or oracle network.
- Transparent System — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical performance of node operators and oracle networks, as well as check the real-time prices being offered.
Cardstack aims to leverage Chainlink’s blockchain-agnostic capabilities to integrate its Price Feeds across multiple blockchains and smart-contract platforms. This allows customers and merchants to use the same exchange rates, even if they are selling and buying via two different networks or blockchains. Combining that with layer-2 interoperability technology like state channels, we believe we can provide a user experience for customer payments that are as easy and user-friendly as those offered by centralized payment apps, such as Square’s Cash App, WeChat App, and Alipay.
“As the crypto ecosystem evolves, we expect to see even more types of tokens or assets, whether they are pegged to real-world currencies or tied to a community’s curated value. We look forward to continuing our work with Chainlink, tapping into its shared oracle infrastructure to bring the value of decentralized payments and commerce to the mass market using secure decentralized oracles.”
Cardstack Founding Director Chris Tse
About Cardstack
Cardstack is the world’s first cooperative SaaS platform — where users, designers, developers, and service providers work together to break the status quo, creating the shared software catalog for the next decade.
Users mix and match features to build fully functional apps and custom workflows on their own, benefiting from prebuilt templates, themes, and no-code tools as part of a cohesive user experience. Experts jump in to make these apps more powerful and connect them to existing enterprise systems while hosting providers run the apps in the users’ preferred environments.
This open marketplace, based on open-source software and an open protocol that rewards all contributors, creates connections without intermediaries in a sustainable ecosystem that aims to become the catalyst for Web 3.0.
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About Chainlink
Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universally connected smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.
Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter and follow @chainlink on Twitter.
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