Building on Blockchain the Right Way

Leveraging a global development community to create meaningful sustainability

Ivan on Tech chatted with our founding director Chris Tse about what Cardstack has been up to, and how we are creating the next full stack framework for Web 3.0 in order to unlock the potential of the decentralized Internet. Below are four takeaways from their discussion.

Not all open source is equal

What if we could pay open source developers fairly for their time and labor? What if we could create a experience layer that became a viable marketplace for everyday people to use open source applications? What if we could use token economics to make sure everyone pays their fair share, and gets rewarded sustainably? That’s what Cardstack hopes to do.

“It’s about spreading the word so that we can really build something much closer to a indie true community open source project, and not a corporate open source project. We see a lot of these token projects that look very much like a Facebook open source project, where they’re paying for 99 percent of the developers’ time on it. To actually become a true community project, you need to really engage developers. Doing that right is the real challenge.”

Cohesive decentralization

There are a lot of user experience benefits to centralization — but a lot of downsides. Can we have the best of both worlds? Cardstack believes we can. Our approach is to build the best orchestration tools, make them open-source, and give them to users to run on their own.

“So how do you go from the user experience — the experience layer of the decentralized internet — and then let that orchestrate all the amazing decentralized parallel experimentation, so that that decentralization does not lead to a fragmentation so that it’s unusable. How do we create that kind of oxymoron — being cohesive, yet decentralized? That’s the problem that really drew me into this space. Cardstack is a manifestation of our current progress through that, and our vision for the future.”

Composability

Today a user’s digital life is made up of many pieces of software that are only able to work together through platforms that extract, own, and sell your data as “payment.” What if we created a way for apps to be natively composable, using open-source standards, across both the cloud and the blockchain?

“Google took a decentralized web and made it slightly easier to search, and then suddenly became the choke point. And Facebook took information sharing from different links and then took their choke point. I don’t want Coinbase to become that, right? We want to make sure that we have a global development community, building not just really friendly apps, but in a distributed way. That’s, I think, why you want Cardstack to give you the acceleration — the framework — to actually deliver those nice orchestrated applications, but deployed as flexibly as WordPress.”

New metrics for success

The project doesn’t stop at overcoming the technical obstacles to building the full stack — it’s not enough to make it work if it’s not easy to use. Focusing on the UX is what will make Cardstack accessible and easy to use for not just technologists, but designers, researchers, artists, and thinkers to join our project and make it human and interesting.

“If we don’t build the experience layer to be perfect — and not only on par with what the centralized world gives us, but exceeding it, really innovating on top of that — then this is all for nothing. We’ll have some interesting experiments, have some kind of speculative wealth being created along the way, but this is not going to be real. We’re not going to be really happy about it, looking back at it 10 years from now, unless this actually moves technology and user experience and product management forward, and invites people not just to say, “Oh, I’ll do an ICO, whatever,” but actually decide, you know what, I’m going to quit my job at Facebook and do a true open source project and build a business on top of a collaborative community that’s organized by a token ecosystem of all types. If I can accomplish that, we’ll be successful, and I’m going to be obsessed about it.”

Watch the full interview: