Feb 9: Inside Cardstack This Week
Merkle drops, Gnosis Safe migration & 2022 roadmap
Merkle Drops
We are further developing the Cardstack technology stack to improve launched products like Card Pay and Card Wallet, and to prepare new protocols and UX designs for beta testing.
Card Reward, a recurring Merkle proof protocol that we have been developing during the last few months, has completed end-to-end testing in our staging environment. Merkle proofs (a.k.a. Merkle drops) are often used by projects to reward participation based on user activities, e.g. an early user is retroactively airdropped tokens after engaging with the protocol through a dApp’s claim function.
Many of these airdrops are built using special-purpose, single-use websites. However, our Card Reward Protocol is designed for pluggability, so new algorithms that calculate reward value can be deployed and updated multiple times by a project. Our initial testing focused on a Merkle drop grounded in on-chain data collected during the Card Wallet/Card Pay beta. We will continue improving these algorithms in order to reward the members of our community for their contributions more fairly, and we plan to use this Card Reward Protocol as the underlying technology to offer more Merkle drops to our beta testers. We have built these rewards within a recurring model that distributes new rewards based on users’ ongoing activities, not just on previous airdrops. These features will be rolled out once this initial retro-airdrop is complete. We aim to create continuous incentives for participation in the Cardstack community.
Gnosis Safe Migration
As a way to improve the user experience and transactional efficiency, we are migrating the Gnosis Safes created alongside the Card Pay Protocol (e.g. merchant accounts and prepaid cards) to the latest version of Gnosis Safe. Gnosis Safe 1.3 is optimized for layer-2 deployments, and it allows us to easily deploy the Card Pay Protocol to other popular L2 chains such as Polygon and Avalanche. This migration was also recommended by Trail of Bits as a way to upgrade our smart contract family. We have completed testnet deployment, and we are preparing to schedule deployment to mainnet and migrate existing safes. We do not believe that any user action is necessary, as this upgrade can be done automatically without user intervention.
2022 Roadmap Prioritization
Last week, we published our 2022 product roadmap. The roadmap reflects our start-of-year planning across all product lines, spanning engineering, design, and product marketing functions. Much thought has gone into the prioritization and sequencing of these activities, so that we can ship early and plan for technological integration between internal teams and external technologies, especially those capable of multichain deployment and stablecoin integration.
We are also repositioning the activity of our web framework that undergirds the Card SDK workstream to better match the work in progress involving Card Space, our decentralized hosting environment. This reorientation should expedite the launches of various Web3 features that will accompany our wallet and payment protocol, while also plotting an integration path to leverage the additional data management features provided by Card Compiler. These developments will give shape to more sophisticated multi-step processes surrounding invoicing, governance, and other multi-party workflows.
We will release additional information involving more detailed components that have been planned in the coming weeks.
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