We want to break down app silos in favor of an open digital world. With Cardstack, end-users can mix and match features from multiple apps or dApps without worrying about a mess of separate cloud subscriptions or utility tokens. What’s even more exciting: our system lets users design incredible new workflows — joining services from different layers of the Internet — that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a centralized world.

This breakthrough is made possible by Cardstack’s composable design paradigm, which renders units of information as bite-sized, encapsulated cards, which can be expanded, embedded, attached, chained, triggered, versioned, cloned, approved, rescinded — or saved forever. In a decentralized world, your data should be as networked or as sovereign as you want.

Developers can use the Cardstack Framework, a comprehensive SDK, to create powerful, card-based blockchain apps. Build anything using modular narrative and discovery containers. Easily construct custom workflows using our Cardstack Hub, which orchestrates data and value transfer across multiple blockchains and the cloud. Drop in ready-to-use functionality like searchable indexes, real-time notifications, uniform user permissions, flexible containerized deployment, and much more. Everything is extensible, and is 100% open-sourced.

This ecosystem is governed by smart contracts powered by the Cardstack Token (CARD), an Ethereum-based ERC20 token. CARD isn’t just any old cryptocurrency: it’s designed specifically to create a sustainable marketplace where open-source developers are rewarded fairly, while allowing users to curate and combine the perfect mix of software services to fit their needs.

Here’s how it works. When a user spends CARD, it seamlessly forms smart contracts between the user and their chosen apps, before getting staked into a reward pool. Based on anonymized usage data tracked by the smart contracts, the pooled tokens are then periodically distributed to the apps’ creators and contributors according to a decentralized algorithmic payment and governance model that rests in the hands of the community.

Just like other cryptocurrencies, CARD users can become miners to validate transactions and earn fees. But unlike Bitcoin — which forces miners to solve useless math problems — Cardstack analytic miners help calculate the reward function of who gets paid out what, while sifting out spam, making the system fair and resilient. Analytic miners’ results compete in a sortition scheme we call proof-of-analytics, so reward algorithms are never under a single party’s control.