June 23: Inside Cardstack This Week
Card Wallet & Card Pay Protocol
Beta testing for the Card Wallet
We have successfully pushed the first version of the Card Wallet, an iOS application, through App Store Connect and received Apple’s approval for TestFlight beta testing. This version of the Card Wallet includes all the Web3 features necessary to support layer 1 on mainnet as well as layer 2 on xDai chain. We are doing iterative testing internally, especially as we add new screens, so that users can benefit from more capabilities for end-to-end payments.
We anticipate that we will collect signups soon, so we can add approved beta testers to the roster on TestFlight. Those users can give us feedback on our Discord channel, when they test out the end-to-end workflows and explore edge cases that we may not have encountered during development.
Gas fee substitution on Card Pay
On the protocol development front, improvements are being made to the core Card Pay protocol family. The aim is to increase the robustness and handle special error conditions that arise when wallets are too low on tokens to be able to pay for gas. While users do not need to have a separate gas token to perform actions through the Card Pay protocol, they do need to have enough value in one of their token balances, because the system will deduct the requisite tokens to substitute the gas fees that are advanced by the relayer.
Many gasless transaction services previously subsidized gas without deducting any value from consumers. As gas prices went up, most of those services had to eliminate those subsidies, as they became expensive, sometimes totalling more than $50 USD per transaction. While we do not anticipate layer-2 gas costs to reach this level anytime soon, we do realize that it is important for the relayer to deduct some equivalent USD value in tokens in exchange for the gas fees that are being paid.
Our system of gas fee substitution is quite sophisticated. For regular users who want to buy something via Card Pay, the gas fee is ultimately charged to the merchant, ensuring that no user needs to think about gas fees when buying an NFT or digital membership. These changes are being rolled out continuously on our testnet as well as via the JavaScript-based Card Pay SDK. User-facing features will be released gradually during the private beta program, once the user interface for each function is properly exposed.
AMA with KuCoin
On Friday, 18th June, Cardstack participated in an AMA with KuCoin. Chris Tse addressed various questions surrounding the development of Card Pay, the technologies behind Cardstack’s software ecosystem, the workings of a decentralized software marketplace, and much more.
Read the full transcript here.
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