July 28: Inside Cardstack This Week
Card Pay Protocol, Progress on Card Pay’s dApp & Wallet & Upcoming Protocol Features
Launch of Card Pay Protocol
We reached a huge milestone this week by releasing the first beta launch of the Card Pay protocol, the Cardstack dApp, and the iOS Card Wallet. These three components of software collaborate to create a layer 2 payment processing network that is fast, easy, and affordable. This network includes the core Card Pay protocol for payment processing and the Card Bridge protocol for layer 1 and layer 2 integration.
For this beta release, we invited a handful of Early Access Program applicants to join the first batch of external testers. We invited users who owned iOS devices because our Card Wallet provides additional capabilities beyond what a Web3 wallet such as MetaMask can display. These beta testers were given an Early Access Program guide and an invitation code from TestFlight, Apple’s test app distribution service carrying the beta version of Card Wallet. They were also given an invitation to a private Discord channel where they could request test faucet tokens, Kovan ETH, Kovan DAI, and Kovan CARD to test the full bridging deposit and withdrawal workflows. Community members interested to know more about the intricacies of this launch can access the Early Access Program guide through this link.
Progress on Card Pay’s dApp & Wallet
We will be releasing additional features, especially around UI components that expose already-deployed protocol such as merchant payment and prepaid card management capabilities. Updates to the dApp will be deployed without user intervention, and updates to the iOS will be pushed periodically to TestFlight. We will also work on fixing bug reports. Lastly, we plan to invite more testers to expand the scope of user devices and experience levels.
The testing is currently performed on a pair of testnets called Kovan and Sokol that represent layer 1 and layer 2, respectively. The smart contract that will be deployed to mainnet is currently in the second round of security audits. Next week, however, we will deploy the contract to mainnet and leverage our upgradable contract framework as enhancements and bug fixes are made to the protocol. Once we feel comfortable with the user-facing features in both our dApp and our mobile app, we will allow users to interact with the mainnet contract using real funds.
Upcoming Protocol Features
We will continue to develop upcoming protocol features involving reward cards (Card Reward) backed by community tokens like ERC-20 CARD, and we plan to soon add merchant features that will enable the sale of products and services backed by NFT on layer 2 (Card Commerce). This economic ecosystem will serve as the foundation for our storefront on the decentralized web (Card Space).
While these features will be offered first to Early Access Program members, we will keep the community updated as we continue working through the roadmap. We are excited to have reached this milestone. Our team is growing, and now that the core infrastructure is in place and live, we will be able to deliver more user-facing features at an increasing pace. We thank the community for its support, and we are excited to bring mainstream-ready experiences to the Web3 ecosystem.
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