Mar 9: Inside Cardstack This Week
Animation engine, Web3 Catalog, Card Pay & Card Reward Protocol
The past two weeks have been a busy time. We focused on developing the user profile system and the new navigation for Card Wallet.
We also continued to work on the computed properties and formula systems of Card Compiler.
The Cardstack Animation Engine
We’d like to highlight a project that received some dedicated effort last week: our animation engine. The goal of the Cardstack animation engine is to provide users with realistic spatial and physical environments where they can create, assemble, and distribute cards.
This works similarly to the physics engine in a game engine like Unity or Unreal. Its main goal is to provide high-performance and believable animation, i.e. the world moves the way you’d expect a physical object to move — within a simple developer API that does not require any specialized training to leverage. We have made great progress in developing the momentum preservation system, so that users can interrupt an animation and allow the object to return to its location in a natural and predictable way.
This animation technology will be deeply integrated into our Boxel Design System. It will allow any developer building a card with Boxel to receive “magic move” animations as capabilities that do not require adding many lines of code. We hope to publish a new version of our animation library within the next few weeks.
Web3 Catalog
Additionally, our team is finalizing the design work and the editorial content for the initial launch of the Web3 Catalog, so that we can share our research of the current Web3 landscape with the broader Internet community. We are trying to make our explanations accessible to people who do not have crypto experience through comparisons to existing SaaS or Web2 terminologies and software categories.
We will ask the community to help us as we continue building the catalog; community members will be able to submit additional Web3 projects that they know of or work on, so that we can increase the coverage of our catalog and reflect all the amazing progress that is occurring across the whole ecosystem.
Card Pay & Card Reward Protocol
As we continue refining the payment protocol, we are also preparing to deploy Card Pay and the Card Reward Protocol family to many of the EVM-compatible chains that are currently gaining users.
As part of that effort, we are writing a whitepaper with supporting developer documentation, so as to guide other EVM chains that want to bring customer / merchant payment protocols to their chain through the prerequisites and operational requirements. With this whitepaper, we aim to help these chains to fully integrate our payment protocols and introduce their functionalities to their user bases.
We will focus on chains that have low-cost transactions first; but we are considering deploying Card Pay to mainnet, as a way to help users who want to settle large amounts by leveraging our stablecoin price oracles, our smooth payment request systems, and our smart contract settlement workflow.
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