WONK COMUNNITY: CARDSTACK

CARDSTACK

The experience layer of the decentralized internet

Cardstack is the experience layer of the decentralized Internet. We believe that orchestrating cohesive User experiences across the blockchain and the cloud is essential to bringing decentralization to the mass market.

The App Store era turns software features into standalone native apps, which usually do not communicate with each other and require users to choose between multiple overlapping features to form their workflows.

Today, there is “an app for everything”. More than USD 70 billion have been paid out to developers of iOS apps in the last decade. When the iPhone was first introduced, there were 15 apps: iPhone, Mail, Web, iPod, Calendar, Camera, Maps, Photos, Stocks, Clock, Notes, Calculator, Weather, Text, and Settings. It allowed people to manage their lives on the go, facilitating communication and even giving directions, while their music collection served as the soundtrack to their new iLife. But all’s not well in today’s app world. Outside the category of games and entertainment, most users refuse to pay for apps, which is why nearly all of today’s apps are free. Additionally, the sequence of steps needed to use a native app — search, download, find the icon, launch, skip tour, register — has severely hampered the adoption of new apps. The result is that most iPhone users settle on a small number of apps (< 5) for daily habitual use. Many of these apps are supported by advertising. For a majority of development teams working outside of FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon), the original business model for apps — “users pay money to buy app” — is effectively dead.

DECENTRALIZED USER EXPERIENCES

Decentralization can be thought of more concretely as the recentralization of workflows around a user. The user can initiate, orchestrate, and make decisions about transactions that are coordinated locally (i.e. over the counter) via cloudbased market makers or through the logic and consensus mechanisms of various blockchains. Parity with traditional, single-function apps is not enough. The vision of multiple apps and Apps working in harmony demands a generational leap in user experience in terms of composeability and interoperability. As the use cases expand beyond crypto trading and finance, this general pattern of user orchestration can be used to redecentralize the data locked behind

cloud-based subscriptions through integration hooks. With the right architecture and design system, a usercentric, decentralized UX can exhibit the fluidity of a consumer social network, while facilitating structured transaction like a line-of-business system.

THE RISE OF CARD-BASED UI

To enable this breakthrough, we need to break the problem space of complex user interfaces and workflows into manageable pieces. Each piece is bitesized, encapsulated, and happens to look like a physical card, which can be embedded, chained, auto-filled, attached, triggered, expanded, versioned, cloned, rescinded, and approved as part of a cohesive user experience; it floats effortlessly on top of multiple cloud environments and blockchains. At the same time, we also need to zoom out and establish a new set of rules, working out how these cards can stand on their own, be embedded in other apps, and act as hosts for other cards when called upon to do so. We can then use the rewarding power of the blockchain, streamlined through a cardbased ecosystem, to make features that were previously offered in proprietary and expensive silos pervasively available to millions of people around the world as bona fide open-source software.

TECHNOLOGY

Cardstack is a leap forward for blockchain at every layer of the software stack — providing a toolset that unlocks the potential of the decentralized Internet for everyone.

- APP FRAMEWORK

Cardstack Framework is a comprehensive SDK for building powerful, cohesive blockchain apps. At the core is Cardstack Hub, which orchestrates data and value transfer across multiple blockchains and the cloud.

- AGGREGATION PROTOCOL

Cardstack-powered dApps can tap into the Tally protocol, which gives dApps the power to perform complex computations to organize large networks of users — such as batching payments, counting votes, and rewarding good work.

- ECOSYSTEM TOKEN

Developers can monetize their Cardstack- based apps via the smart contracts powered by the Cardstack Token (CARD), an Ethereum-based ERC20 token designed to fairly reward Cardstack- powered communities.

Features & Benefits

For End-users

Mix and match multiple dApps and cloud apps
Create amazing new workflow and app combinations using Cardstack Hub
Use one token (CARD) that forms retainer agreements with all the services you need
Keep your data sovereign, or transmit it anywhere easily, with our card-based user experience
Get started quickly with fiat currency: no crypto expertise required

For Developers

Use our comprehensive SDK to build powerful, beautiful, extensible apps
Access a deep library of powerful drop-in functionality
Improve your app experience using Cardstack’s off-chain aggregation
Get paid fairly by our community-run payment and governance algorithm
Get reimbursed for your material costs
Keep things 100% open-source

For Analytic Miners

Do the useful work of powering community-run algorithms that create a fair distribution of wealth
Help protect the system against outliers, bad-faith actors, and spam
Earn fees in the form of Cardstack Tokens that can be held or circulated back into the ecosystem
Get compensated via a sortition scheme that prevents single parties controlling the reward function

Cardstack’s approach to decentralizaton lets self-sovereign users act as their own hub, so that interactions with applications and services running on networks of different topologies flow through a software stack controlled by the users.