Cardstack 2021 Roadmap - Cardstack Strategy Talk
Hi, I'm Chris Tse, the founding director of the Cardstack project coming to you from the land of the web three. A lot of community members have asked us to update the roadmap and I'm glad to do so. Uh, one of the tricky thing about roadmap is that Cardstack is a big project with many, many layers protocol, frameworks, products, mobile app web app. And when we explain our roadmap and the way we conceive of the work that we do sometimes is a bit more complicated. So today I'm going to go through a roadmap in a slightly new way.
So we're going to try something new. We're going to try having three types of question. We're going to answer. I'm wondering one minute.
And so what you're going to get a, when we ship the product, that's currently in progress, and then I'm going to spend five minutes to describe when this is going to happen throughout this year. And then only after that, what I talk about, the more traditional deck elaboration on how we can pull off something, this complicated, it's this intricate in a short time. So let's go right in.
So I'm going to answer the question. What apps can I try when we ship? So the one minute version of the 2021 roadmap for Cardstack is simply the following. And you may have seen this already is that we have three main product. Card pay Card space and Card catalog in Q2, which is what we're working on right now has been very much I'll focus on an effort is to ship a DeFi protocol.
That's focused on payment so that people can pay each other at low-cost using layer two technology from a mobile phone so that everything is seamless and is rewarding because we have an entire infrastructure of stable coin and reward token integration so that when you pay for something you get rewarded and a merchant gets paid. And using that infrastructure, we're going to create a web builder, a DAP builder, a decentralized version of the WordPress and Squarespace and Wix, where you can drag and drop to create on your own personal space, your own personal slice of the decentralized web, your own page that could represent yourself your as a creator or as a business. And on those capability you're going to pull from, and this is something that we're going to add. To make, spin it into a big marketplace, which is you can use any cards that is available in an open source software catalog. We call Card catalog.
This allows, uh, the Cardstack team to port via a set of basic cards that you can use, uh, texts, images, videos, NFTs that you can bring into your space. But we don't imagine that will be the limit. We want people to go beyond it and have developed a built new cards that were presented, new workflows, new invoices, new software, catalog, new products that represent real world objects, new wrapper around protocols you see, and all of those things can be designed beautifully within a cohesive experience, and you can add it and drag and drop in the card space. And then you can transact. Using the cockpit system.
So the idea here is that the catalog and the space and the Card pay worked very nicely together to provide the future decentralized swipe experience. That's as easy, if not easy to use than the current silo, different website and different nap that people have to do on the central as well. So hopefully I hit that in one minute.
So in five minutes, I'm going to talk to you about what are the milestones, what are the things that allows us to be sure that we can be able to roll this out in a gradual manner? So looking back at this particular timeline, currently, we're in the middle of the cockpit project. So we are planning to do a test net release, um, so that we can test it and also perform security audits. We're also simultaneously building a mobile wallet for iOS first and then enjoy the follow-up.
The reason we felt that we needed to do our own wallet is because the use experience of dApps is really limited because a lot of the mobile wallet, including Mehta mask is pretty hard for new user to use. And it has a requirements that you need to have ease or have a stable corner, know what that is, or have a Coinbase account for that to be. Useful from the first minute onwards. So we're building a really nice onboarding services and process using Cardstack wallet. And once we put those together and then we test them making sure that everything's working smoothly, we'll go may not.
And that protocol we initially available next day blockchain, but it can be expanded to other EVM compatible network relatively quickly so that we can provide a nice payment infrastructure, including rewards, earning loyalty point, earning stats and badges. Uh, you can hear more about. Um, I talk on Card pay and how that works on the link below. Uh, the idea here is once we go main at then we have basically a web three wallet and adapt infrastructure to go and build up this ecosystem. So the next phase is to move to Card space.
A no Kodak buildup. And we believe that we really want to get creators who are exploring crypto on this, trying to figure out what's after NFT. What can I do on this decentralized web beyond just flipping Jeffs and stuff like that in a trading market. So we want to invite a group of people to help them understand our full vision and Card Space space, but let them guide us on what are the initial features and content that will make their particular space, their own and useful, and allow them to do the workflow they want to do.
And that allows us to do a beta testing where we can take all the existing UI components and the framework and test it with a real group of user who are trying to push the envelope of what they want to do on the decentralized version of the web. And only after that, we're going to plan to do a public launch where anybody. Who can pay the fee to buy a membership. And obviously cardholder will get a discount and a status because a Card is one way that you can pay for this membership.
And then you can get your own Card Space base. Once you're quite a membership, to be able to do everything that you can do from day one. Now, once we get to Q4, we have a set of new features planned in our head about suite of, uh, product features that instead of adding it to Card Space space as a default feature, we're going to put it in the catalog. So it's an extension. It's like a gallery, a template gallery, an additional. A plugin app store of sorts so that you can see drops of different features that comes from the Cardstack team and our network of development designer that work with us.
That will be pretty exciting. It's almost like new product and new music, except with dropping new software. But want to listen to the market, see what the market wants, and then convert some of those features that may exist in different dApps or even different website from a traditional centralized SAS service and convert them into modular Cards, additive catalog, and see what people do with these building blocks bins in an ingredient.
Once we have that going, what we call the first party Card things that is built and designed by the Cardstack team will through the Cardstack, uh, kind of contracting syndicates structure. We want to really take that, uh, experience that capability and to give it to all developers. So we're working on a Cardton SDK, and again, everything we've been doing so far with car pay and Card Space space are all based on the technology behind the SDK. We'll talk a little bit more about what's in those technology stack, but we want to then, you know, Really bring this Card SDK out there as a broad base development tool.
So any developer, no Java JavaScript can download Cardton STK in building completely new type of Cardss, derived from existing feature and extend them. So that they can submit those cards into the community's feedback and say, Hey, I want to sell this Card. I want to make this as part of the standard set.
And we're going to create a governance. A mini doused system would voting where we can have different rounds of competition of which would be, you know, we'll give grants based on a good idea that may need a little bit of help to get through the finish line. Some of them will get, uh, immediately. Uh, included in the catalog, especially if it's things that involve, uh, tokens and finances.
We want to make sure that there's a security that goes into make sure that those Cardss are safe. So to submit and voting, and the curation process allows us to grow the card catalog slowly and deliberately at the beginning. But once we feel like the tools are good, really expanded it to be a open-source marketplace that allows you to add anything to spaces and pay, not only each other, but the developer. A commission or royalty for giving you some great tools so it can build your space.
So that's the basic idea of the timeline. So we obviously won't have new releases, a Card pay throughout the year and Card Space space will be up there along the time, but the magically Q2 is about Card pay. Q3 is about Card space and Q4 is about Card catalog and beginning to engage external and third party development partners on the creation of the Cardstack ecosystem. All right. So Card Catalog, Card Space & Card Pay actually dovetails a lot with the idea of how we believe we can grow the Cardstack ecosystem. So I gave a cop talk about a month ago about this virtuous cycle.
So Cox space, it's really about creating, launching new businesses and new workflows. And the way once you launch this workflow, you use cart pay to transact with each other, to Paige, other as merchants, as suppliers, as people to provide a reward points. And then Card catalog. All of this thing is built by software in the software that runs the Casa ecosystem, the circling around the circle. It's all created by a network of open source developer. Now, so this, as you can imagine, is.
About really helping us by the end of the year, complete the virtuous cycle. We talked about where users, customers, teams, and organization, vendors, and providers, and develop a designers can do what they do to keep this loop going. So more content need to new new workflows and more workflows lead to more spending it to more reward and more activity to contributors, which allows them to reinvest a time to be more tools, uh, more, more software that can be used to.
In the note copay says to create even more content in this ecosystem, which is paused, decentralized web. So as you can see our war rope members, really a way to take what looks like a really big vision, but by being really, really focused about doing kind of roughly things, serially one at a time, we're able to get to the point where we actually completing that loop. And then we'll just observe and see what people are doing, what the users and customers and merchants are doing, and just reinforce them by better framework, by better development tools by better design system and just. As a way to help people find each other and find a strength to, to grow this ecosystem without a whole lot of, uh, help,from the Cardstack team. So let's go back to the S the, the, the roadmap discussion about how do we get here.
So the, wow, it's always been the trickiest part of Cardstack to describe, because it is really, really, really deep software. So last year, uh, when we released the roadmap, we were saying, you know what, let's explain to people, uh, in our community, exactly how we think about things. So we have these like different categories of work things. What kind of use cases are we trying to do? We're trying to bill a decentralized SAS platform. How do I want to host it? Well, we want to provide a standardized hosting service called Card space so that you don't have to go out and find and run your own.
No, it's easy to do, even though you could take our software and do it that way. We want people to build the application, the dashboard, the workflow, the Cards themselves directly with no code, creating schema asset for develop, develop it. We want them to be able to share that information on a registry so that their templates, whether they're coming up from a developer angle, which is JavaScript or coming from like end user angle, which is a card that has a look and feel you can share in your registry.
And then we want to provide a set of templates, whether you're making forms, some sort of database as a collections, things that are associated with crypto assets, things that have a workflow aspects of it, things that, uh, is an action to pay, to redeem, to sell, uh, layout. Uh, you saw that from last week, uh, when we show Card space ability to drag and drop and create a whole page and also rules say ways to automate your, your, your system. And those are templates that are derived from the system. And to do that, to make sure all this very despair thing, right? Think about it.
Each one of these things is its own, uh, website or its own SAS service, right? The most, very few software on the web does more than one or two of these things. But the way we can do this is because we have this as a design system, through a sheer set of components and the ability to tie together. We can actually bring all of this together as if it was just one cohesive space. And these are different objects, forms, objects, uh, asset objects that you can go and rearrange. And for developer, that same type of architecture goes all the way down where everything is just a car and is a full stack.
A Card is a full stack application. You can connect the front, end, the API in English and in the database all together. And you can deploy it without having worry about all the services.
And to do that, we need the platform. Run-time I won't go into detail, but we are bringing a lot of full stack kind of clouds. So, but in a way, this must much is centralized that you can just leverage when you're building a Cardton and not have to worry about where do I upload this, or where do I deploy it as part of that Connie for system. And obviously Card Space space is always going to be a, a freeway. And if you have a membership with a Cardton membership, uh, to, for you to deploy it, because you'll.
Card token gives you a subscription to it. Uh, but on the other hand, I also expect the world where the runtime can run within a corporate, uh, for enterprise use cases or in different countries where the jurisdiction may be different. And to tie this all together, especially when there's multiple hosting provider.
We need people to be able to accept the same payment. So it looks like one payment network that's we use the Tally and card protocol and the integration of different tokens and stable coins. So you can actually pay for servers within the network using a. Protocol that we define and that protocol ties together. Token holders, people will providing liquidity, uh, people who are providing, uh, um, uh, on a cross hunting and cross honoring a membership, which is my customers who is paying me can be your customers too, because we will have a renumeration where that activity may pay a commission or get compensated from an existing pool of revenue. But this was pretty complicated and there was a little bit of an implication in the way we draw a diagram that we somehow go through.
All of these features kind of linearly, and that's quite true. We, we begin and we iterate on this feature basically on full stack basis, across the whole thing, roughly to decide where right now, around the S side, where we have figured out the lay work. Workflow stuff. I have a lot of a workflow component and we are beginning to work on the layout component to make sure that we are getting ready for Card Space space. Uh, but that's not really how software development actually works.
Uh, the way we actually work. And maybe this is good for us to just give that as a community, as a mental model is that we basically group these techno technology into four basic. Kind of work area or technical work stream as we call them once a design system contact at the end of the day, it's about making things cohesive from a user experience, point of view, and you never achieve. Integration from the user point of view, accidentally Apple is a good example of that.
You do not just like slow some software together and hot way to get, to have the, what cohesively the iOS, the iPhone Macko as the apps wall meticulous is designed around this user, a human user interface framework. That Apple has such good intuition and invest so much time in and we want to make sure the Cardstack, I take the same approach. So we use something called a Boxel.
So design system to define, uh, the architecture of how things assemble and, and, and can be combined and reviewed and twit tear apart and link together. And we want to make sure that when things are, uh, put together, they are very smooth and you can theme it so that. Boxel. So does not require it to look like Cardstack. You can look at your brand, but still retain all of the shared components of forms collection as a threats action layer on rules. So that's the design system work.
We talk about it as our Boxel. So design system is our update, but that includes most of the work on the front end, uh, as well as in the mobile Regina. The other part of Cardstack. And this is the part that is actually, uh, been a long time coming, even related to our early JavaScript work is to create a application framework.
So when you build a card and you want it to compose together, you don't need to build another backend. You don't have the fine. And then the hosting company, Cardstack. The note itself, the hosting, the hub, as we call it contains a compiler that creates your code around the story, your data, a snapshot to make sure that when you're linked to data, that you keep a copy of it in case that other place go off, because in the world, Google, you expect them to have everything run it at the same time.
But when you're doing decentralization, you got to keep a copy for yourself, like take a screenshot of something. So we have all of that as part of Cardstack companies. This dedicated, full stack application generator that uses the Card schema so that every Card that is developed by a developers with it is internal to Cardstack. Or when we have the SDK more publicly available from a broader base of developer, they follow the semester.
K they've derived from the base Card, modified the templates. So it looks very nice, but that can now be brought into calc JS, which is where it's. Uh, it's built, it's automated and it's distributed globally so that anybody who sees that car, I encountered a car.
It could be a music, a video call can download the source code and run it, uh, very efficiently and make that part of the cohesive experience. So the application framework and design system is the cloud part of what we're doing. And the host of service is a reality that even in the world of decentralized web or web three Sirium or blockchain base, you still need services to a host of files. You still need to have a developer onboarding tool and documentation.
So we want to make sure that the set of hosted service that provide standard tools so that people can orient themselves in the ecosystem has to have a place to start. Because once you have both a design system, a set of services and an application framework that allows you to go from your, develop a desktop, to a laptop, to go create the thing all the way to a globally distributed network. You can now think about how that interacts with the protocol era.
When new protocol comes with as layer, one layer to all of these protocols are so much opportunity for us to tap into this power, but how do you. Deal with a wallet. If they have to 10 wallets to access 10 networks, we want a mobile wallet to be a multi chain wallet to have one way starting with the Ethereum compatible blockchain, to be able to interact with these assets. Asset.
They were just assets in a car who cares what networks on that's already been in our vision. And by producing these design system application, we'll host a service. We are in a much better shape, uh, bringing in, uh, our wallet infrastructure to be able to bring that capability to the decentralized web, where the experience is unified. And then if you need to pay people, you know, create token rewards, we can have protocols that we bill. Is a first party protocol as well as governance protocol to helps our ecosystem grow and curate and direct to what's. I'll go.
And that's where we believe the mochi chain future can exist. Multi chain. It's just, multi-cloud, it's just part of the infrastructure and services we expect from the world. So these four work streams roughly correspond to our own teams division of work. Um, and based on these, uh, divisions, we are able to have the technology foundation to support a set of product experiences. Right.
So as we say earlier, I saw earlier in Q2, we focused on Card pay. So this is LD defy product in Q3. We're got to figure out, uh, how to launch the Card Space space. This is how create a crypto product.
So the Web three product, and then we're going to follow by open-source calc a marketplace or software. All three things are not three different like code basis. They are all just different set of Boxel components that leverage is the underlying services framework, design system and the protocol. And this way, when we later on say, Hey, we let's introduce a new types of tool for merchants.
Let's say we want to introduce new type of tools for designers and other partners. We just add to this part and then the out on the line technology foundation strengthens. And then in future, we can add like a Card membership system, which allows you. Not just for Cardstack membership, perfor for another organization on new types of decentralized autonomous organization, or even real organization using Cardstack to run their membership system.
They can now draw upon this new technology. So we can expect that this type of, uh, Kind of organizational template will grow over time. Whereas the bottom part, the technology foundation will mature. We'll get better and different things. Uh, we'll get a richer. Uh, the framework will get more functional, but the idea here is that we feel that the work we've done.
Prior to Q1 of 2021 gave us most of the technology foundation. We needed that we're going to focus on a product experience-based approach so we can bring, uh, not just piecemealed say, Hey, let's launch Boxel or let's launch a wallet. Now we're going to launch a complete Card Pay experience, a complete web builder experience, and a complete software catalog one at a time. So that's basically what we working on and what's really exciting for me.
When we look at the work we have done, uh, in the last year and a half, especially on this particular version is that there are still a lot of ideas that we have about, you know, making the Card framework better, uh, work, using better technology around CDN to make Card distribution, even. Better. A lot of the talks I've given about, uh, software distribution or about the future or payment processing, uh, can be multi-year project. But what's really cool about that.
A moment we have is that we just feel like we have just enough parts to delight. The first and second, third group of customer with the tools we have worked so hard to assemble. And the experience you're seeing with these demos and more will keep coming, shows you that this is not something that is going to intimidate people as people pay more attention to blockchain, maybe because of NT...-NFT may be because of
Bitcoin and ether prices either way. I want them to see themselves. Being a daily user of crypto product. And the only way we can do that is to build beautiful experiences that are scrumptious and that completely delightful. And that's our goal, and we're going to do it one step at a time. We're going to delight one person at a time and we asked for the community's help to help spread the word so that we can bring the full Cardstack vision to reality, not in software and product, which we are very close, but into the real world, into the Lyft experience of what does it mean to be in 2021 and be a digital citizen that wanted us to take control that this is our web.
This is out into that. And we're going to build it the way we want it. So thank you very much for your time today. And I will give you more update as we get closer to the different milestones. Uh, we'll look for your feedback within the beta program, all in the invite program to spread the word and bring this tool to the mass market.
Thank you. And we'll chat again soon.
2021-04-08 08:41
