September 2022: Tech Status Update

Updates on the development of payment scheduling tool, reward calculation, Cardstack Wallet, and Card Builder.

The Cardstack team continues to make improvements and add new features to our product suite. In this month’s update, we cover the changes made to our payment scheduling solution, rewards calculation, Cardstack Wallet, and Card Builder.

Scheduled Payments

We have completed an initial smart contract development for the scheduling tool. It leverages Gnosis Safe infrastructure to allow users to schedule payments. We have the SDK running end-to-end with scheduled payments being executed on-chain.

Our team is working on refining the protocol to begin dApp development. The dApp will allow end users to schedule one-time or recurring payments.

Staking Rewards

We have completed the architecture design and have started the implementation of the Rollover System for reward distribution using recurring Merkle drops. With Rollover System, the un-redeemed rewards — whether it is from staking activities or other contributions — will be rolled over to the next cycle if not redeemed by the wallet owner in the previous cycle.

This feature allows for cheaper redemption in terms of gas prices. For example, if you do not have enough rewards accrued in a particular payment cycle, you can simply wait for another cycle until the balance is enough to justify the gas fee payment. Obviously, on layer 2 chains where the gas price is not as high, the rollover feature is not necessary.

However, this rollover feature allows us to cost-effectively deliver rewards on mainnet even for wallets with comparatively smaller funds. Once the rollout of this feature is completed, we will then begin migrating our staking system to the Ethereum mainnet.

Cardstack Wallet

For the Cardstack Wallet, we continue working on the UI for seed recovery as part of our approach to improving the onboarding experience for casual users.

The proposed improvements will further allow users who have never used a Gnosis Safe to get a Safe created automatically when they create a user profile.

Card Builder

We have made further improvements in Card Builder to pull existing Card types from a catalog, allowing users to reuse them when creating a new card. The runtime UI is still based on the scaffolded UI that emphasizes precision over aesthetics.

The runtime team has been collaborating with the design team to incorporate the latest Boxel design system into the Card Builder environment.

Our plan is to release demos of our end-to-end user and developer experience once we get through some refactoring related to managing the changing codebase when the users are making both schema and data changes to the underlying cards.

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