Hello, I am a CARDSTACK enthusiast! If Cardstack is new to you, Here is a short introduction from my personal understanding. How to explain Cardstack is definitely not an easy job! Because the system and the potential of this project are the things far from what we can understand and imagine. But I will try to explain from easy to complex, and hope it is helpful for you to know Cardstack.
Cardstack is aimed at providing an open-source platform for building web-apps (Software as a Service, Saas) in a cooperative way. You might think it has nothing to do with crypto and blockchain, but let me explain to you. So imaging the following situations:
Content creation: You write an article or make a song or make a video, and publish it on Medium, Spotify or Youtube. You can hardly publish them in elsewhere, because the content is well-formatted in one platform and binded to commercial agreements with this platform. Also you get what you paid by the platform without transparencies . Cardstack solution: You article are wrapped into a innovative wrapper called Cards, which can be show exactly the same in any Webapps build with Cardstack, and your articles, music, or video are packed with commercial terms registered in the blockchain (Ethereum and other) via Cardstack Gitchain, you can claim your ownership no matter where it is showed. Your content will be rewarded fairly because the Cardstack Tally system accurately records the viewing and reusing of the content in different Website and apps, with a blockchain based technology. Therefore, it means you own your content for 100%.
Potential competitor to Saas provider:
Medium: $10 billion cap
Spotify: $ 45 billion cap
Netflix : $ 200 billion cap
Tiktok: $100 billion cap
More info see this article: https://medium.com/cardstack/composable-monetization-techniques-for-creative-content-e90946ce78d3
Software development: You are a developer. You contribute your development to commercial platform iOS, Android or Windows system then your development is isolated and not reusable by others. Or, if you contribute open-source then your development will most likely not be rewarded. With Cardstack, your creation of Cards , which perform as one of the functions in a Webapp, will will list in the market place link with your ownership. The creation of cards is easy and fully integrated, because cardstack has provide a set of basic cards on the Cardstack Boxel ,which you can reuse all the template cards with version control, UI design, Motion engine, Action, and so on for free. Your cards can be sold to other web app developers to build their web app, in a similar way to Wordpress in building a website by using many plugins and themes. Cardstack provides a marketplace Call Card Catalog for all these cards, and forms an ecosystem.
Wordpress: $140 billion cap , 37% of website in the world.
More info see this article: https://medium.com/cardstack/who-are-the-card-makers-504f784881fb
Website/Webapp hosting: You like to create apps to monetize your ideas, e.g. sell your stuff/release your podcast/video, etc. But, you have no experience in developing webapp/website. Surely Workpress is an option but you need more advanced applications like database management, blockchain interaction, gaming or even 3D engine. Cardstack solution: you can use the existing Card from the Card Catalog to assembly a webapp in a “no-code” way, without a single line of code. Cardstack builder provides you a no-code fabrication platform to build the app by using any Cards from Cardstack Catalog. Most of the Javascript engine are back with Cardstack CatalogJS, so you don’t need to worry about your development for other platform (reactJS,nodeJS,..) has problem to show in the Cards, such as Gaming engine developed based on HFTM5, virtual realities, etc… Your use of Contents cards, software cards that built your webapp/website will be reward proportionally from your revenue calculated by the tally system. Also you have a integrated payment system Card Pay, which powered by Ethereum + layer 2 solution for the support of most of the ERC20 token/stablecoins, and ERC725 NFTs, so that you can easily get paid with very low fee, enjoy integrated user experience with Layer 1, and asset management all in one.
No-code SaaS platform Airtable: $1 billion
Notion: 2 Billion
More information: https://medium.com/cardstack/the-ultimate-card-building-tool-25c442e22bed
Workflow building : You are big tech company and rely on a bunch of SaaS software to manage your team, e.g. Slack, Asana, Trello, Gmail, Dropbox, and etc. You have to paid each month a huge amount of subscription fee for all these SaaS software, but you hardly get a well configured platform for what you need, and also you need to pay much higher price if you choice to host the service on your own cloud for security reasons. With Cardstack Workflow , you have a open-source and free of charge workflow platform with messaging, threading, tasks management, document storage and sharing, attachment versioning, back-end integrations in one platform. If this platform is not well-configured for your needs, you can easily extend it with hiring some developer to work only on one particular modules. Very important is that, because Cardstack is open-source, you own your Cardstack platform and your data as well in your cloud, without paying any extra fees.
Slack : $ 20 Billion cap
Asana: $ 5 Billion cap
more information: https://twitter.com/cardstack/status/1329833400459522057?s=20
Cardstack ecosystem: Cardstack will involve tremendous participants from different parts to the ecosystem: developer, content creator, service provider , user, blockchain service provider, oracle network, etc… They are managed automatically with the Cardstack Tally system, using the Card token as a ledger.
If you are a user, you can deposit any fiat (from credit cards) and crypto (coins and tokens ) and convert it into a “prepaid card”, it will be converted into Cardstack token and stored in the “reserved pool”. Your “1 ETH” remains to be “1 ETH” if you don’t subscribe to any service. If you use “0.1 ETH” for subscripting a service, this “0.1 ETH” will be calculated and converted into Card token based on the Oracle data, and this worth of Card token will be staked into the “reward pool”, then distributed fairly to the service providers/ developers/ content creators after one subscription (e.g. 1 month) .
Service providers will be required to deposit “stake” of Card token into the “reserve pool” to guarantee the service. The Tally “miner” will be rewarded with Card token for processing the huge amount of data, e.g. viewing records, clicks, etc. using modern GPU from the mining pool. Card token is used for a huge ecosystem because it functions like money in a bank, and the money people deposit will be converted and stored as a Card token. If the “reserve pool” is short of Card token, it buys back the Card token from the DEX/CEX market (kind of buy-back of stocks). Therefore the value of Card token is increase along with the size of the ecosystem. This makes Card token much more valuable than other tokens which are used for fees, governance, mining rewards, incentives, etc.
More information: https://medium.com/cardstack/the-card-protocol-explained-c78e8e091a72
At the end, Cardstack built a fully decentralized experience of the new era of Web, the Web 3.0 , based on the blockchain which is fully invisible to the normal users, with a very high level of user experience. It will be a new revolution of web and application through a cooperative way, by escaping the silo of Silicon valley giants, returning the power of the web to everyone, and initiating a new era of software development.
Currently the team is extremely focused on the building and release of the second version of Cardstack, and will combine the release of the platform with intensive marketing this quarter. The team has very successful management on the ICO funds and able to continue developing without any financial support for next 5 years (2025). The teams are located in New York “World Trade Center”, led by an excellent team from University of Columbia, MIT, former product designer from Apple, etc… see the team: https://resources.cardstack.com/contributors
The price of Card token is 0.001$ at the time of writing this article (July 2020) and 0.014 at the time of second revision (March 1st 2021). Based on the above analysis, the potential market cap of Cardstack is short-term $100 million (0.1$ within half year) + $1 billion+ (1$ in 1–2 years), and long term $100 billion+ (10–100$ in 5–10 years). These are purely prediction, and is not financial advice. But I believe, it will be eventually a serious competitor of Silicon Valley giants.
Hope you like this short version of the introduction of Cardstack, and enjoy your journey with Cardstack! Feel free to share this article.
derek
(copyright of the images are belongs to Cardstack, and Cardstack medium)
