What’s New at Cardstack?

Progress update on Card Pay

Cardstack Team

Published in

Cardstack

3 min readJun 25, 2021

Progress update on Card Pay

The smart contracts underlying the Card Pay protocol (for payment processing & exchange rates) and the Card Bridge protocol (for layer-1 & layer-2 integration) have reached the point of completion.

We have also completed the development of an off-chain storage approach, allowing us to store additional metadata related to the Card Pay protocol, such as the design of the look and feel of a particular prepaid card or reward card.

The design assets (including background colors, gradients, and textures) are not stored on-chain; they are stored off-chain with an on-chain reference to a certain theme ID.

We are working on leveraging The Graph (a decentralized blockchain query service) to expose the underlying data model, transaction types, and actors (like customers and merchants) via a custom subgraph.
We have successfully pushed the first version of the Card Wallet, an iOS application, through App Store Connect and received Apple’s approval for TestFlight beta testing. This version of the Card Wallet includes all the Web3 features necessary to support layer 1 on mainnet and layer 2 on xDai chain.
We’re getting ready to grant early access to the Card Pay dashboard and the Card Wallet mobile app to selected users at the end of June 2021. We will start collecting signups for beta testing soon. Stay tuned!

“We believe that fast, cheap, and easy transactions are needed for normal users to experience Web3 technologies. Therefore, we are launching on layer-2 chains as the primary networks. xDai chain is the first one.”
– Chris Tse, Founding Director of Cardstack

Cardstack VS SaaS

Chris Tse, Founding Director of the Cardstack Project, explains how the components of the Cardstack ecosystem compare to today’s popular SaaS tools.

In this video, Cardstack Founder Chris Tse compares Cardstack to various SaaS tools from the Web2 world. He presents the different parts of this well-coordinated Web3 platform, protocol, framework, and ecosystem — all of which work together to make up a full stack that covers countless different use cases.

Read the articles here:

Cardstack vs SaaS — Part 1: an introduction to each component of the Cardstack ecosystem, including Card Pay, Card Commerce, Card Tally, and Card Reward

Cardstack vs SaaS — Part 2: Cardstack’s product suite as compared to the different SaaS tools people use today

Cardstack & KuCoin AMA

On Friday, 18th June, Cardstack participated in an AMA with KuCoin. Chris Tse addressed various questions surrounding the development of Card Pay, the technologies behind Cardstack’s software ecosystem, the workings of a decentralized software marketplace, and much more.

Don’t worry if you missed it, you can read the transcript here.

“What I’m proud of is that Cardstack is a true general-purpose platform. We take our inspiration from Ethereum, which was kind of the first generalized blockchain/smart-contract platform, whereas ETH’s competitors at the time were application-specific forks of Bitcoin. The power of the platform is that developers can extend the capability by adding their special sauce and expand the platform’s use case.”
– Chris Tse, Founding Director of Cardstack