Ten Reasons to Love Cardstack

Why you should support the Cardstack Project

Cardstack Team

Published in

Cardstack

7 min readMay 31, 2018

10. We’re Committed to Open-Source

Our project aims to create a fair decentralized software ecosystem to challenge the closed-off Silicon Valley app silos that dominate our digital lives. Cardstack is entirely open-source, with one codebase that can be deployed as a peer-to-peer dApp or web-based app.

An open-source community is only sustainable if contributors are paid fairly for their work. Cardstack’s consensus protocol rewards makers for the apps and features they ship, whenever they are used. And Cardstack’s composable design means that good code can get reused — and remonetized — again and again.

9. The Cardstack Hub is a Game Changer

The Cardstack Hub makes on-and off-chain data orchestration a breeze. Plugins connect the Cardstack Hub to any data source — including any blockchain, starting with Ethereum and Hyperledger. Apps running on Cardstack talk to the Hub over one standard API. This makes it easy for both end users and developers to participate in the decentralized Internet.

The best part about the Hub is that it belongs to you: data indexed in the Cardstack Hub is not controlled by Cardstack; it’s yours. The Hub provides the glue that lets your apps talk to your data, with no rent-seeking middleman in between. No longer do we have to blindly entrust centralized platforms with our digital lives.

8. Our Tech Has Been Proven

The Cardstack Project has been in development since 2014, scaling to a multimillion dollar company by providing services to private institutional clients. Now we’re building upon this success by bringing Cardstack as an open-source project to the global community. You can experience our work firsthand on our GitHub repository.

The first use case of the Cardstack architecture was the Cardstack TGE Dashboard, a web application for token generation events.

7. We Believe in Fairness

Cardstack aims to navigate new ways to responsibly harness the power of algorithms, and involve our community in the decisions behind how computers make decisions. Our approach makes algorithms more composable and layered, so that we can allow governance to evolve through mixing and matching.

Algorithmic governance will also drive our reward model. Our consensus protocol in development, Tally, is rooted in the principles of statistics and gives decentralized miners a strong incentive to run the same software as everyone else, to source the same raw data, and to get the same results. Our aim is to distribute wealth fairly to the open-source makers and creators who contribute to the Cardstack ecosystem.

6. We Prioritize Composability and Cohesive Design

Instead of offering fragmented experiences, we embrace composability at the architectural level, so that developers and end-users can mix and match the tools they need to form their ideal workflows. We visually chain together different applications and data states so that users can see how information and value flows between the networks that they interact with on the blockchain and beyond.

This breakthrough is made possible by Cardstack’s design paradigm, which renders units of information as bite-sized, encapsulated cards, which can be expanded, embedded, attached, chained, triggered, versioned, cloned, approved, rescinded — or saved forever.

5. We Value Inclusivity

We believe there is a wealth of untapped development and design talent ready to build the future decentralized Internet — if only it were made more approachable for them. We designed the Cardstack as a full stack of powerful tools for participants of all skill levels.

By making it easier than ever to ship and use dApps, and rewarding work with a fair, decentralized payment model, we’re deliberately creating the on-ramps for the next million creators, thinkers and dreamers to the decentralized Internet.

4. We’re Committed to the Highest Standards of Compliance

The Cardstack Foundation, headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, has worked closely with the Swiss regulator FINMA, as well as our financial and legal partners Bitcoin Suisse and MME (which orchestrated the groundbreaking Ethereum crowd fundraiser) as part of our commitment to ensure Cardstack’s Token Generation Event (TGE) meets the highest standards of regulatory compliance. Our smart contract, as implemented in our open source codebase, reflect the latest FINMA guidance, and our payment model has been evaluated by FINMA and deemed compliant with their standards for a utility token. We are proud that these efforts mean our token, which is a payment/utility hybrid, will be fully functional from the moment it is unlocked.

Additionally, the Cardstack Token Smart Contract (the mechanism by which people may contribute to Cardstack’s crowd fundraiser and receive Cardstack Tokens), passed two security audits by a world renowned security research firm and allows for upgradable contracts and token vesting. You can see the audited open source contract code on our GitHub account.

3. We Will Have Easy Fiat On- and Off-Ramps

The Cardstack ecosystem is governed by smart contracts powered by the Cardstack Token (CARD), an Ethereum-based ERC20 token. CARD isn’t just any old cryptocurrency: it’s designed specifically to create a sustainable marketplace where open-source developers are rewarded fairly, while allowing users to curate and combine the perfect mix of software and services to fit their needs.

In the ecosystem we’re building, users will be able to pay for all the apps they want using fiat currency, like topping up a prepaid card. CARD will be staked on users’ behalf into a reward pool, which will then be distributed to makers according to a community-governed algorithm. Miners will collect a fee for securing the network. Makers and miners will then be able to exchange their CARD payments for fiat currency, completing the circle.

2. We Have a Great Team and Advisory Board

Cardstack has been in development for more than three years by a team of technologists and designers led by founding director Chris Tse. Chris is a technologist who has been working on distributed software architecture, composable UX design, data analytics systems, and open source ecosystems for nearly two decades, and holds experience leading R&D and innovation teams for Fortune 500 companies. In addition, he’s co-founded two other blockchain startups that have pioneered use cases for decentralized technology, Dot Blockchain and Monegraph.

As our software stack has matured, we’ve recruited talented storytellers, savvy marketers, and community support evangelists to help get our tools into the hands of users. The Cardstack team come from a wide variety of educational and professional backgrounds, but align behind Cardstack’s vision and believe in this project’s potential to effect positive change and create lasting impact. For example, Lead Developer Ed Faulkner brings experience from MIT Media Labs as well as open source project Ember, and Senior Blockchain Developer Hassan Abdel-Rahman contributed to the Cardstack Project after working for McGraw-Hill Education and Sun Microsystems. You can read more about the entire team here.

We are also proud of our impressive advisory board who have contributed their expertise to Cardstack since the outset of the project. Among them are Oliver Bussmann, President of Crypto Valley Association and former Group CIO of UBS and SAP; Nicolai Oster, head of advisory for token projects at Bitcoin Suisse; Thomas Linder, partner at Swiss legal, tax, compliance firm MME; Giotto De Filippi, cryptoeconomics advisor; Tom Graham, co-founder of MapD and TLDR Capital and pioneer in GPU databases; Sumit Gupta, former GM at NVIDIA; David Wachsman, founder & CEO of Wachsman PR and leader in fintech media; and Lester Lim, digital marketing strategist based in Asia.

1. We Believe in Our Mission

We’re tired of centralized digital superpowers keeping us in silos, extracting our data, and controlling our digital lives. Combining our user experience, application framework, and token mechanism, Cardstack is laying the foundation for the mass market adoption of blockchain — and more importantly, an Internet that belongs to all of us.

As Chris explains:

Chris Tse explaining his vision for the experience layer of the decentralized Internet on Ivan on Tech.