Introducing Cardstack
The experience layer of the decentralized Internet
Cardstack is a revolutionary experience layer that makes blockchain technology usable and scalable — creating a decentralized software ecosystem that can challenge today’s digital superpowers.
Centralized tech giants force us into silos, and capture the value we create. Early decentralized tech like Bitcoin demonstrates the promise of blockchain, but has only delivered gains to a handful of enthusiasts. Cardstack is a leap forward for blockchain at every layer of the software stack — providing a toolset that unlocks the potential of the decentralized Internet for everyone.
We want to break down app silos in favor of an open digital world. With Cardstack, end-users can mix and match features from multiple apps or dApps without worrying about a mess of separate cloud subscriptions or utility tokens. What’s even more exciting: our system lets users design incredible new workflows — joining services from different layers of the Internet — that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a centralized world.
This breakthrough is made possible by Cardstack’s composable design paradigm, which renders units of information as bite-sized, encapsulated cards, which can be expanded, embedded, attached, chained, triggered, versioned, cloned, approved, rescinded — or saved forever. In a decentralized world, your data should be as networked or as sovereign as you want.
Developers can use the Cardstack Framework, a comprehensive SDK, to create powerful, card-based blockchain apps. Build anything using modular narrative and discovery containers. Easily construct custom workflows using our Cardstack Hub, which orchestrates data and value transfer across multiple blockchains and the cloud. Drop in ready-to-use functionality like searchable indexes, real-time notifications, uniform user permissions, flexible containerized deployment, and much more. Everything is extensible, and is 100% open-sourced.
This ecosystem is governed by smart contracts powered by the Cardstack Token (CARD), an Ethereum-based ERC20 token. CARD isn’t just any old cryptocurrency: it’s designed specifically to create a sustainable marketplace where open-source developers are rewarded fairly, while allowing users to curate and combine the perfect mix of software services to fit their needs.
Here’s how it works. When a user spends CARD, it seamlessly forms smart contracts between the user and their chosen apps, before getting staked into a reward pool. Based on anonymized usage data tracked by the smart contracts, the pooled tokens are then periodically distributed to the apps’ creators and contributors according to a decentralized algorithmic payment and governance model that rests in the hands of the community.
Just like other cryptocurrencies, CARD users can become miners to validate transactions and earn fees. But unlike Bitcoin — which forces miners to solve useless math problems — Cardstack analytic miners help calculate the reward function of who gets paid out what, while sifting out spam, making the system fair and resilient. Analytic miners’ results compete in a sortition scheme we call proof-of-analytics, so reward algorithms are never under a single party’s control.
The brain behind all of this: Cardstack has pioneered an advanced, scalable consensus protocol called Tally. Early blockchain apps that require every user action to be submitted as an on-chain transaction are crippled by long wait times, rising costs, and absurd resource demands. Tally solves this with cryptographic proof-of-usage messages that are efficiently validated and aggregated off-chain before reporting the final payment splits back to the smart contract on-chain — dramatically improving the experience and reducing the demands on the Ethereum blockchain.
Tally gives dApps the power to perform the same complex computations that digital superpowers use to organize large networks of users. And Tally miners can use GPUs already deployed in the crypto world—which is a big deal. It means we already possess the hardware to run Tally’s GPU-optimized cryptographic proofs, statistical analysis, and machine learning algorithms — supercharging our dApps and potentially putting the decentralized Internet on parity with Silicon Valley in the very near future.
Combining our user experience, application framework, token mechanisms, and consensus protocol, Cardstack is laying the foundation for the mass market adoption of blockchain technologies. Get on board — as we work to replace today’s siloed, monopolistic software landscape with an Internet that belongs to all of us.
Read More
- How to Get One Billion Users on Blockchain by Chris Tse
- Growing a Healthy Software Ecosystem by Lead Developer Ed Faulkner
- Building on Blockchain the Right Way
- The Cardstack White Paper
Join our community
To learn more about Cardstack, visit https://cardstack.com.
Join the Cardstack community channel on Telegram at https://t.me/cardstack
Chris Tse (@christse) is a technologist and designer who has been working to humanize blockchain technology since its early days. In 2014 he founded Cardstack, where he leads a team of blockchain architects and open-source contributors to build the experience layer of the decentralized Internet. He is also a co-founder of blockchain companies Monegraph and Dot Blockchain Media, and has more than a decade of experience leading R&D and innovation teams for Fortune 500 companies. Chris has a degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.
