May 12: Inside Cardstack This Week
Card Pay Protocol & Web dApp
Card Pay Protocol
This week, our focus is to integrate the exchange rates from decentralized oracles like Chainlink into our Card Pay protocol. One of the core problems with payments is the fact that the customer and the merchant do not always transact in the same currency. Therefore, it may be a challenge for the customer to pay the requested amount, especially when it is to be paid in a fluctuating cryptocurrency. Crypto users often agree on a rate lock, using a particular exchange rate for the number of tokens that the senders will transfer to the receivers to fulfil the payment. Very often, this is done manually.
In the Card Pay system, the protocol automatically determines the rate lock via a price feed used in DeFi. These prices come from many different liquidity sources and are deemed high-enough quality to be used for trading and lending applications. Card Pay taps into these high-quality exchange rates — not only between stablecoins and USD, but also between different fiat pairs — so that we can not only display prices in the user’s preferred currency in the wallet and Web dApp, but also use those same exact rates to deduct the right number of tokens from the user’s wallet and deposit them into the revenue pool, from where the merchant can then claim his earnings. This lies at the core of the Card Pay protocol. We have been working with the Chainlink team on this solution. Our developers have successfully integrated those price feeds in testnet and included this capability in the Card Pay SDK, which in turn is consumed by both the mobile and the Web application.
Card Pay Web dApp
On the Card Pay Web dApp front, we continue to work on the onboarding of various participants to the network, ensuring smooth end-to-end workflows for suppliers who are bridging their stablecoins as well as their reward tokens (like CARD) using the Card Pay protocol bridge. Merchants and customers do not need to bridge their own tokens; they can transact with each other directly, using only a layer-2 wallet — this is the purpose of the Card Wallet mobile application.
We are refining the merchant onboarding experience, so that merchants who want to accept Card Pay can use the dApp, and then present either a link or a QR code to their customers, so they can pay with their prepaid card balance in their wallet. Merchants will also be able to track their cumulative earnings in SPEND (equivalent to 1 USD cent) and claim the stablecoins that fulfil those spending activities into their own wallet under their control.
AMA with Chainlink
In a live AMA with Chainlink, Chris Tse spoke about Card Pay, including the bridging of crypto & traditional payments and the role of Chainlink oracles.
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