The Future of Cardstack: A Conversation with Chris Tse and Huoxing Caijing

Cardstack founder speaks to major Chinese tech media

Cardstack is about breaking down the barriers that are preventing people from using decentralized applications (dApps). We see a tremendous opportunity for our full-stack software framework and platform to unlock the massive yet unrealized potential of dApps.

The technical hurdles to mass adoption are the same whether you are in Zug or Beijing. Cardstack founding director Chris Tse sat down with major Chinese tech publication Huoxing Caijing to talk about why Cardstack is perfectly positioned to become the on-ramp to the future decentralized Internet.

The following has been edited and condensed from the original transcript. The Chinese report by Huoxing Caijing can be read here.

What are the pain points users are currently experiencing in their digital lives that Cardstack is trying to address?

I think the digital superpowers have a tremendous amount of control over both the data that people have and what features people can get. The developers of these big companies build tools, and then users can only access the tools that the companies give to them.

I think what we’ve learned from open source development is that developers will build the tools that they want to build — they have an itch they want to scratch, or they have a feature they need to create. And then when they do it, they share it with others. I think that’s a beautiful way of building the future software, where the builders, the developers, and the users are working together to say, “Hey, what tools do we need?” To me, the decentralized software ecosystem is missing one thing, which is: how does a developer get compensation from the users?

What we’ve learned in blockchain and crypto is that with incentives, bounties, and long-term mining rewards for developers, you get developers who will say, “I could build this feature for you if you want it?” And users will say, “Absolutely, here’s two Bitcoins to go make it happen.” And by the way, you as the developer will be rewarded in the future whenever your software is being used. That, to me, is much healthier and much more organic than having one or two or three centralized giants determining all the software you can use.

What is the core design needed for Cardstack to build a truly decentralized software system, and what are the difficulties?

Because we’re building a decentralized software ecosystem, we have to look at the full stack. It’s not just one layer. It’s not just one protocol. It’s not just one service. It’s not just one website. We have to look at everything that goes into a real production quality application and say, “How do we decentralize each part?”

So we use things like JavaScript. We use the JavaScript packaging software called NPM which has its own plug-in rich ecosystem. We use Docker to wrap blockchain clients. We are using Ethereum for our token mechanism and our billing function. We support other private blockchains using the existing clients to build a more scalable function that does not require the public token. Each one of these things are components of our framework, so the developer gets the whole thing and says, “I can now begin building applications that are functional and useful and ready for mass market.”

So far with blockchain we haven’t seen that, because every team that’s working on crypto is working on doing something very specific, and then building one specific app to demonstrate it. But that app is not designed for an end user. It’s designed for maybe another developer, or to show an investor their progress.

Cardstack thought about what parts from the existing tech world work, and what parts will need to come from the decentralized world. And we’re just trying our best to package it together and then invite developers to make changes, but more importantly to add to it and broaden what it can do; add more features that are currently locked into one app, and then share it in an open-source way.

Why will users and developers want to use Cardstack when the App Store and iOS systems they use now are working fine?

The App Store, especially Apple, wants to stand between the developer and the individual — they only want the user to know about Apple. They don’t really want you to know about the developers behind the apps.

That creates a kind of disconnect that makes developers not want to build for the App Store. They want to build a website or create mini-apps or do something that allows them to talk to their users, and they want to have a social channel where they can engage. I see a lot of this in crypto, where developers are actually talking to the users on Telegram or on WeChat.

And that’s creating a much more intimate relationship around the tools and how these tools get suggested. It’s no longer a formal and impersonal suggestion, but an actual conversation. And that’s much healthier; people are much happier. They feel like when the software ships, they have a part in it.

Regarding your question about the current app ecosystem seeming sufficient: my feeling is that because we only get the apps we have from these ten big companies, we don’t even know what can happen.

But the truth is that, if you look at what people do when they have to do something with apps, it goes something like: “Which app do I use to do this thing?” And then they kind of have a map in their head of how to get to these things that do not work with each other, and there’s no workaround or ability to customize it.

I think bringing an open source ethos of mixing and matching and growing and sharing into the tools the user sees will give users much richer, much more diverse, much more localized, and much more shareable digital lives than we have seen in this one-app-per-icon world that we’re in today.

What are the use scenarios for your token CARD?

Our main goal of the CARD token is for it to become the universal fuel for a blockchain app. Since instead of paying gas here, and paying Bitcoin fees there, you can just use CARD as the way to pay the material cost.

But what about the developer who built that app? Right now, they don’t get paid because all you do is take the material cost of the tokens and pay for it, and they get nothing. But we’ll say, “Okay, let’s double the fee we charge the user in CARDs.” Now you’re paying double as a user, but that’s fine because if not for the developers building this beautiful experience and all of its middleware, you wouldn’t have this app to use at all. We are seeing this as a new way of paying and being an active supporter of the software. Not just at the protocol layer, but all the way up the stack, as a way to bring real-world revenue to the decentralized app ecosystem system.

And people pay for apps all the time, right? You pay for cloud service to host your website, you pay for in-app purchases, etc. These are all fees paid to Apple, Google, or a host of cloud providers. But our vision with CARD is that it will become the metering and billing unit to pay for software; it’s actually the primary cash flow for trickling down the revenue to all the participants providing hosting, providing software, providing protocol. And that’s really necessary for end users too, because without that they would get trapped in token hell.

Are there any specific use cases yet, or is it still conceptual?

Our first use case is called Card Space, a content and community management system.

Once we’ve built this community management system for ourselves, we’ll say, “Hey, does any other project in crypto need these community management and incentivization tools that are already integrated on-chain with a smart contract? Take ours.” And guess what? That website that is running the other token project is now running Cardstack.

That’s how we get distribution — by building something useful. Having people take our tools, make a copy of it, and then start using Cardstack, and say, “Oh, this is really good. So I guess when I build my decentralized music platform, I should use Cardstack, because I’m already using it for my bounty program that rewards visitors to my site.”

Who are your competitors in terms of what is currently available?

Every app out of Silicon Valley is trying to do what another app is already doing, but in a more profitable way. There are no more new ideas, and there’s a fixed pie of how much attention and customer e-commerce cash is available, with everybody fighting to claim it. And I think they are myopically forgetting that if you ask people, “Do you have all the software you need to do everything you ever wanted to do?”, the answer is no. You can share photos on seven different platforms, but you still can’t do other basic things. People still e-mail PDFs back and forth. There’s a lot of workflow that is not yet solved by Google, Facebook, or even WeChat.

And yet, on the other side, you see people building custom apps or creating a new workflow using Word and just trying to make it work outside of what is offered in the polished apps. All the workflow gets pushed out into the tools that people have, so you see things like WordPress being used for things that it’s not intended to do. So I think there’s actually a tremendous unmet need in software in general, because the digital superpowers are so focused on the profitable use cases of a certain (already outdated) monetization model, that they’re forgetting that software is supposed to help you do simple things.

How do you change user habits from what they’re used to in order to get them on board with the decentralized Internet?

I think you don’t in the beginning. We believe that the best way to get user adoption is through progressive decentralization — meeting them where they are. Don’t introduce anything new into their workflow besides a new backend that they don’t even see, which allows for the incorporation of decentralized technology. From there, you can gradually move into, “Hey, do you want your own key?”

We’re building Cardstack in a way so that even if you started using the Cardstack software on cardstack.com, you can eventually say, “I want to take the user contributions I make to cardstack.com and move it so it’s under my own control.” And then you can take that subset out and use Git.

It will be very easy for us to take a subset of content that is being contributed and say, “Here’s your original. You now take it as an author, as a writer. This is the original.” If cardstack.com shuts down, you still have the contribution that you write. It’s like software, right? You made a copy, I fork my own software, I keep it.

And that type of architecture allows us to not change the paradigm on day one, but as the paradigm changes — with the world demanding more decentralization — we’re able to support it through our architecture. We want to have the check that the user can always click a button and download the entire experience they have from Cardstack onto their own personal desktop. And that keeps us honest. The digital superpowers, the big companies, don’t have that escape hatch, and I think that’s the main unique capability we have. But more importantly, philosophically, you only care about decentralization if you’re user-based.

Who is on your core team, and do they have experience with blockchain?

I myself have significant experience in the blockchain world. In 2004, before I went into doing Fortune 500 R&D, I actually built a peer-to-peer file transfer app for private communication between two parties. So I was in the decentralization peer-to-peer movement before Facebook even became popular. And then, as a person who really believed in protocols, I got increasingly depressed as things became more and more centralized. I saw the pendulum swing from decentralization — the web was very decentralized — to Google. And then Facebook which made me really depressed because it was super-centralized.

But then we swung back toward decentralization, especially with Bitcoin and then Ethereum. When I met Vitalik and he told me what he was thinking, I said,” I can dust off all the ideas I had 10 years ago.” Because that’s what I really believed as a young kid graduating from the university. The pure science of it — I was all about decentralization and the peer-to-peer model.

And that was when a lot of the tools like file sharing for illegal music sharing were kind of popular. I mean, that was probably a generation ago, but it was kind of the last wave of peer-to-peer decentralization before our current moment. So I think I have the credibility of having built a peer-to-peer stack from the bottom up.

Now, my team of senior engineers: Ed Faulkner is the lead developer. He got his master’s at MIT, then worked for a Boston-based company called Akamai that makes distributed systems for content distribution networks, or CDNs. So behind the scenes, he was actually working on distributed architecture very similar to the one we have with blockchain.

When I met him about three years ago, I told him my vision of Cardstack in terms of user experience. But I also understood his background, so I was like, “Hey, you and I should work together.” And we’ve been working together ever since. Cardstack reflects his understanding as a systems engineer, dealing with security systems. He was the guy who did a lot of the certificates for SSL like when you see the lock icon for Akamai. So he knows encryption. He knows production quality and security systems, and he’s been able to combine what he knows from his MIT computer science background with my business thinking and my architecture plan.

As far as my third team member, Hassan: I started two blockchain companies in 2014 after I met Vitalik and Joe Lubin of ConsenSys, both founders of Ethereum. Hassan inspired me thenb to go and build a product for digital art Provenance on the Bitcoin blockchain, so I did that. And then I also did another project that does music metadata since I’m a musician. Hassan helped me build those two products, and is now our lead project engineer — he’s built on Bitcoin blockchain, Bitcoin D, all the low-level details of OP_RETURN, stuff like that, and now he’s in charge of our Ethereum development and our smart contract architecture.

Combined, the three of us have got a lot of expertise around products, distributed systems, and smart contracts.

But I feel like what we’re missing, being an engineer-led company, is other people who are not engineers getting involved in the conversation. And that’s why these kinds of discussions are so exciting; that’s why I’m here. I want to really hear what the people care about and what their questions are so that we can create content. Not to fluff the project up but to actually round it out, and make it more complete in people’s minds. Not only for Cardstack as a project, but for the potential of what cryptocurrency and blockchain implementation can be.

Read More

• From Speculation to Utility by Founding Director Chris Tse
• Growing a Healthy Software Ecosystem by Lead Developer Ed Faulkner
• Developer Blog: Card UI
• The Cardstack White Paper

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