Can Cardstack Bring Decentralized Services To Mainstream Use?

The rise blockchain has pushed “decentralization” into the limelight.

It’s now common to see the label attached to just about anything.

Every day we get to read about all sorts of blockchain-driven projects like decentralized networks, decentralized services, decentralized applications, and even decentralized organizations.

Decentralization’s budding appeal has been partly driven by people’s growing distrust of centralized authorities. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple simply hold sway over most of our online activities using policies that aren’t exactly fair and equitable. In contrast, decentralized services are designed to be free from the control of any single entity by letting rules set in smart contracts govern them. Key decisions or changes to these rules require the consensus of the peers supporting the service.

This democratic and user-centric approach has been a welcome change to what the juggernauts in the tech space have put in place. Unfortunately, many of the decentralized applications and services that have been developed over the past year, while successful in drawing early adopters, have yet to break into the mainstream.

Cardstack seeks to further promote decentralization by reimagining the way people approach their digital activities. Through the framework, users will be able to craft their own user experience using decentralized services. By making decentralization relevant and useful to the ordinary user, Cardstack hopes to bring the concept towards popular use.

Not Yet Mainstream

Despite the promise shown by several blockchain and decentralized projects, they have still yet to gain widespread adoption. Cryptocurrencies, for instance, still haven’t challenged pay cards and digital wallets as the preferred cashless payment method. People tend to stick with what’s familiar. This tendency poses an interesting challenge for all new entrants.

Even if they offer more a trustworthy approach, decentralized services still have to compete against established services in the market. Novel concepts have to be able to make a good enough splash in order to encourage users to try them out. Users have become discerning enough to be wary of anything that they don’t readily find useful or easy to use.

Decentralized services need to make their offerings both relevant and familiar. This is why it is crucial for these projects to find use where they can have an impact on users’ lives the most.

Better User Experience

It’s common for today’s tech users to subscribe to a variety of apps and services in order to manage their daily activities. The problem with this is that users have to sign up for and manage each app or service individually. Some do offer integrations with other applications but these are limited. The data and functionalities of these apps are still often siloed from each other which hampers interoperability. This can become quite cumbersome for users. An alternative is to invest heavily in a comprehensive system that covers most functionalities they need.

However, this simply circles back to the issue of having to rely on and trust a single centralized authority.

Cardstack can change this by providing more customized and streamlined experiences through decentralized means. The blockchain-based framework takes common functionalities of popular online and cloud-based services and orchestrates the interchange of data across them. These functionalities are visualized as cards which users can chain to create their own workflows using an easy-to-use interface.

"What Cardstack offers to developer is the plugin framework to connect to the blockchain that we have today, and then we'll connect the end users to it" says Chris Tse founder of CardStack.

Chris Tse interviewing for Nasdaq

The framework features a token economy that facilitates transactions and rewards within the ecosystem. Users have to spend CARD tokens to create smart contracts between themselves and apps. The system would then be capable of sending requests and commands in behalf of the user and listen to any changes to any of the linked services. Cardstack also features Tally – a highly-efficient consensus protocol that quickly resolves transactions.

For example, an e-commerce merchant may have to use and monitor different applications to handle messaging, shopping cart, and payments functionalities. Using Cardstack, a user can chain these functionalities into one cohesive workflow so that they can simply use one interface to manage everything.

"We want to create a cohesive and at the same time decentralized environment" says Chris.

This will eliminate the need to manage different accounts and subscriptions making users more efficient in their digital activities.

Going Mainstream

Part of Cardstack’s vision is to have decentralized applications eventually take over the services provided by centralized authorities. Through its framework, commonly used functionalities can be deployed using open source standards. These cards can be reused and modified allowing users the ability to personalize the experience they want without needing any coding skills or technical expertise.

By creating a powerful framework, Cardstack appears poised to showcase the value of decentralization. Rather than offer a totally new experience that may make users hesitate, the platform can readily situate these new apps and services within what’s already familiar with users and in a more cohesive manner at that.

All the while, users inherently benefit from the trust and control that these decentralized apps and services provide. They can perform their tasks knowing that they aren’t encumbered by restrictive policies and usage terms.

Ultimately, what Cardstack offers is a way for users to easily and more comfortably adopt decentralized services, or "crypto" as a whole.

"We’re working on getting mass user adoption by making the user experience aspects of blockchain much more usable with software framework to organize the front end, or experience layer", says Chris.

As more users recognize the ease by which they can perform both routine and critical tasks using the framework, it would only be a matter of time for the use of decentralized services to become norm.

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