June 9: Inside Cardstack This Week

Decentralized Identifier & CARD Protocol

DID Infrastructure

We have completed our work on the off-chain storage mechanism that allows for the configuration and theme related to a prepaid card or reward card to be stored in a flexible off-chain storage protocol, while being referenced via on-chain transactions.

The way we do the mapping is to implement a Decentralized Identifier (DID) — a standard championed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and adopted by the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF). By using a DID, we are able to dereference the exact storage mechanism of these off-chain assets from the immutable on-chain record.

Thus, if we want to change the way we store and distribute these textures, configurations, and this branding information from a simple cloud storage endpoint to a decentralized network like Filecoin or Arweave, all we need to do is change the DID resolver implementation; and we will be able to redirect the user agent, which could be a wallet or a web dApp, to retrieve this information from the new location.

This DID infrastructure will also be used to store off-chain assets related to utility NFTs. Those are functional NFTs that give the users who possess them special privileges, such as permission to access content, rights to certain discounts, or the ability to unlock early access ahead of the general public. To perform the correct actions, these utility NFTs will need sophisticated metadata that is interpreted by other applications built on the Cardstack framework. We plan to build on this off-chain storage mechanism and tie it to the other aspects of the Cardstack ecosystem, including the Card Reward system, which will determine whether users or token holders receive a certain badge based on their activity history.

CARD Protocol

The smart contracts underlying two of the four components of the CARD Protocol — namely the Card Pay protocol for payment processing & exchange rates and the Card Bridge protocol for layer-1 and layer-2 integration — have reached the point of completion. We are working to refine the contracts in response to feedback from the smart-contract auditors, so as to ensure that these upgradeable smart contracts are in compliance with the industry best practices for clarity and security. We will prepare to deploy this to the respective mainnet (Ethereum mainnet and xDai chain) to have the contract ready for beta users.

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