Product Update: Card Space & Card Flow
New details about our public hosting service and our decentralized messaging system
Many of Cardstack’s functionalities rely heavily on cards and their interactions with each other. In Card Space, cards remain at rest, behaving like embedded widgets. In Card Flow, cards act in motion, moving in and out of decks and spaces. Together, the two operate in lockstep to bring a seamless Web3 experience to users.
Card.xyz vs. Card Space
We now refer to the Card Space product as Card.xyz, but both names still exist — they’re simply used in different ways:
Card.xyz is a live, public hosting service for Cardstack, supporting the creation of payment profiles in support of on-chain payment use cases. This is where users will be able to create public profiles hosted under the domain name of card.xyz.
Card Space is a more general term, representing “cards-at-rest,” as in a space for cards to be created, displayed, and shared. Our latest work on Card Space is focused on a pure runtime implementation that doesn’t depend on a server component. You can follow this work at this Github link.
When combined with Cardstack Hub, our server-side runtime and database indexer, we can offer access control to hosted “card” spaces. Since we work in Web3, managing access control will be dependent on the possession of tokens or NFTs in the wallet. However, these tokens can be gifted or purchased, so the system is not strictly “pay-to-enter.”
To avoid the proliferation of millions of tokens, space creators can choose to “cross-honor” existing membership tokens and NFTs instead of minting their own. Our Card Reward Protocol has the capability to determine whether you are already in a membership community with the tokens you have in your wallet. The rules of cross-honoring are done using off-chain algorithms written in Python that are processed by our Reward Protocol.
If you so choose, you can also set your access control rules to wallet address without needing a token. It will instead require a message signing request to prove that a user has control over the associated private key. We use this approach for authenticating users in our Cardstack Hub (which hosts card.xyz and our dApp) for the first time.
Card Flow
Decentralized messaging is a big unsolved problem in Web3, as we are still reliant on centralized entities like Discord and Telegram for messaging delivery and account creation.
While there are wallet-to-wallet messaging protocols in the works (e.g. XMTP or Waku V2), we think Matrix protocol will end up being the winner. Our concept of cards is that they are just file-based payloads, and thus can flow on top of any messaging protocol including email. But we are definitely planning to integrate Matrix into our card-based environment via a “cards-in-motion” implementation called Card Flow. We know what Matrix needs, so we can engineer what cards are stored and packaged to fit within Matrix protocol’s expectation.
The first use case of any blockchain-based product is going to be financial in nature, as this is where the composability of existing on-chain protocols really shines. Therefore, our strategic priority for the second half of 2022 is to create the complete web-based SaaS experience on top of our already-deployed Card Pay and Reward protocols and our mobile-based smart contract wallet experience, focusing on businesses’ and teams’ needs as they enter Web3. We will cover procure-to-pay, which includes invoicing, agreements, and payments as starting points. The underlying workflows — including a messaging infrastructure — can be used for non-financial collaboration between businesses and teams, replacing the kludgy Discord bots in Web3 / DAO spaces and Slack workflows in Web2. The enabling of commercial transactions will come first, and it will be followed by collaborative workflows that are truly Web3: non-custodial, protocol-driven, open source, end-to-end encrypted, and developer-extensible via the Card SDK.
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