Feb 16: Inside Cardstack This Week
Card Schema, Card Catalog & analytics
We continue making progress in the product areas of our roadmap:
Card Schema
Our Card SDK team is currently working on a new computed property system that can support Excel-like formulas in card-based applications. This benefits users significantly. By using our Card Schema to define the data model of a dApp, users can define a field as a formula, which can then pull data from other parts of the card or, in the near future, from other data sources such as blockchains and cloud APIs. The Card Schema will not only define the formula, but also enable visual displays for users to manage sorting criteria or other formulas requiring input.
Users familiar with Excel understand the power of defining networks of formulas. Of course, they allow users to compute results, but they also enable refresh capabilities when any of the underlying data changes. Our implementation of computed properties is in its second generation, so that the computations can be assisted by server-side indexing and function somewhat independently of the processing power of the browser.
We are working to ensure that the third-party developers can define these formulas in JavaScript and submit them (along with their modules) to our Card Catalog, so that users can run these formulas in their own hubs, e.g. a personal cloud that works without exposing the underlying data to dApp developers or project teams. This work is currently part of the Card Compiler effort, and we are working to optimize the performance of these formulas by leveraging reactive updating and field-level cache invalidation, so that this V3-compiler approach unlocks.
Card Catalog
In parallel, we are developing the information architecture of the Card Catalog. The initial version will serve as a Web3 catalog. This allows us to index all the use cases, projects, and emerging specifications of various Web3 concepts, so that they can be composed and rendered using the Cardstack interface.
We are currently working on the design of the initial Web3 catalog and creating engagement opportunities for the community to contribute to the catalog. We aim to make this catalog the most complete map of the emerging landscape of Web3 and Web3-adjacent products and technologies.
Analytics & Research
On the analytics front, we are working with a team of graduate students at NYU (New York University) on a development project to measure the gas usage of certain blockchain transactions, especially those made around NFT trading.
We hope our efforts help us better understand the impact of energy usage as it relates to climate change. We are using this opportunity to quantify on-chain energy costs and create a more eco-friendly transactional system–through the use of either carbon credit offsets or climate-neutral badges that may be issued or required to perform certain on-chain transactions.
We are also exploring how these analytics and algorithms can integrate with our Python-based analytic toolset, in order to develop open-source code for these types of use cases that will prove beneficial when we release our off-chain analytics toolkit.
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