Tally is now running on Rinkeby testnet! Feel free to play around with our metering & billing network for dSaaS, taking the role of a customer and/or service provider (note: you don't have to be a developer to try this out!). All you need to get started is a MetaMask wallet. You can use test tokens to buy prepaid cards, subscribe to service providers, register new service providers, and bill customers. Here’s the link to Tally: https://staging-tally.stack.cards/ You can find all instructions on how to obtain test tokens and start using Tally in this blog post:
https://medium.com/cardstack/tally-launches-on-testnet-442efa071f44

Check out our newest episode of the Cardstack Developer Series! Our engineer Jen Weber shows you how to store card data in a local or remote Git repository, using the Card SDK’s Git plugin.
https://youtu.be/JJjQ9_VzB8c

Here’s an in-depth article to go with Chris’s strategy talk about the Cardstack product! Read about the different participants of the ecosystem, how they are connected with each other, and how Cardstack addresses their needs using the Card SDK, the CARD Protocol, and the Cardstack Hub.
https://medium.com/cardstack/so-whats-the-cardstack-product-dfd9223dc300

Always great to rewatch: this short video about the future of content creation and distribution—done the Web 3.0 way. Cardstack enables makers, storytellers, developers, and designers to form decentralized networks and finally create on their own terms!
https://youtu.be/jAmYfF2ITtI

Are you an engineer? A developer? More like a power user? Whichever category you fall into and whatever skill set you have, it is more than enough. You don’t have to learn NodeJS or Ethereum to contribute to the Card Catalog—to create meaning, write content, and share it with the world. Everyone can play an important role in the Cardstack Ecosystem. In this blog post that accompanies his tech talk, Chris tells you how it works!
https://medium.com/cardstack/who-are-the-card-makers-504f784881fb

If you missed any of our latest updates, not to worry. Here’s a recap of what’s been going on this month—from the testnet launch and our blockchain-based data registries to developer tutorials and early-access guides for building cards.
https://medium.com/cardstack/whats-new-at-cardstack-9071c3109628

This weekend, our engineer Jen Weber is attending ETHBOSTON—the Ethereum hackathon hosted by ETHGlobal, where over 100 developers come together to work on dApps. If you're interested: https://eth.boston/

Find out in this article: https://medium.com/cardstack/building-the-card-catalog-bf034445d05e

Congrats to Jen Weber and her team, who won the creativity award from Torus at the ETHBoston hackathon last weekend! Their project was all about privacy & identity. They built SkipID—a dApp to simplify sign-in processes at conferences. The app lets you log in with Torus OAuth and generates a QR code that can be scanned at sign-in, thus eliminating the need for ID checks. It shows a preview of your conference badge too. You can find more details and a quick demo here: https://devpost.com/software/skipid

Our engineer Jen Weber recaps her experience at the ETHBoston hackathon she attended last weekend. Jen talks about the different challenges faced by developers; she provides tips for hackathon sponsors to improve the developer experience; and finally, she explains how her takeaways from this event tie into Cardstack’s strategy and potential.
https://medium.com/cardstack/out-of-the-box-tools-for-outside-the-box-thinking-464f622ba0df

Get ready for EmberCamp! On Sept. 16, our lead developer Ed Faulkner and our engineer Jen Weber will give a talk at the second annual EmberCamp in Chicago. Learn more about the event and/or buy tickets: http://embercamp.com/

Congratulations Chris Tse & Hassan Abdel-Rahman on being granted a patent as co-inventors for rights transfers using blockchain transactions by the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office)! This work, which was done as part of Monegraph in 2014, laid the foundation for a lot of digital collectible projects ever since.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10380702.PN.&OS=PN/10380702&RS=PN/10380702

A customer uses a prepaid card to pay a service provider, by staking some crypto value into the smart-contract-based token pool (where all crypto assets are pooled together). Customers who only have fiat money can buy prepaid cards from retailers, who do the staking on their behalf. Through usage accounting (on-chain and off-chain), we meter the usage and provided services across the network. Tally (acting as the accountant or bookkeeper) marks the prepaid cards, the value, and the spend history to market—so that people know how much they can deposit, how much their deposit is worth, and how much can be withdrawn.

For more details, check out this part of Chris’ talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwO_ZGCk410&t=710s

In most systems, developers run the server, so the user’s files are stored in the developer's data center. At Cardstack, developers deploy their cards to the Cardstack Hub—the decentralized application server that powers the entire system (connecting to various data sources like devices, clouds, and blockchains), which is run by service providers of the users’ choice. This way, users have their own hub/server, their own little personal cloud, where they have all their code—whether it’s for note-taking or music-making or image-editing. It can be hosted by a service provider, but it belongs to the users.

A prepaid card is a store balance that facilitates the providing of services in the Cardstack Network.

As a customer, you deposit fiat or cryptocurrency into a virtual prepaid card. This card has an address (similar to a credit card number), an original value (your deposit), the amount you have spent so far (measured in USD cents/§), and your available balance (which is denominated in USD, but may fluctuate based on the market value of the currency you used to buy that prepaid card). Now, you can use your card to pay for services wherever the CARD Protocol is accepted. Service providers will simply bill you by deducting your usage fees from your balance. In essence, this prepaid card is meant to be the pass for all the things you can do in the Cardstack Ecosystem.

Wanna see Chris talk about the concept of a prepaid card? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwO_ZGCk410&t=165s

Watch Jen Weber’s new developer series on how to enable authentication on Cardstack Hub. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to program access control for who can and who cannot access your Cardstack Application:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAmy6dOo-3Q

Developers, this talk is for you! In case you missed it, here’s a chance to learn all about card schemas. They are essential, as they define what a card is and its relationships with other cards, plus they allow these cards to move around!
https://youtu.be/xL7opLril_4

What is a token pool?

In the Cardstack Network, customers will usually deal with more than one service provider. To enable frictionless billing of mutual customers, we use a smart contract called a “reward pool”. This is like waiters pooling their tips by putting them inside a jar. At the end of the night, they determine what portion of this tip jar goes to each person, just like we figure out what portion of this reward should go to each service provider, based on some usage accounting.

To know how much that reward pool is worth, especially when it contains multiple fluctuating tokens, we need Tally—our accountant or bookkeeper. Tally knows which transactions are happening on-chain and can access cryptocurrency-to-fiat exchange rate services, to calculate the current market rate of the reward pool.

Hear more about the token pool: https://youtu.be/FwO_ZGCk410?t=1070

Introducing the Card Makers

Users, developers, engineers, back-end, front-end, with or without framework-level experience—whichever category you fall into, you can play an important role in the Cardstack Ecosystem! By utilizing your individual skills, you can actively contribute to the making of cards, thus to the Card Catalog. The inverse pyramid of card makers tells you how that works. In the next few days, we will introduce each type of card maker, with the corresponding skill sets that are needed in each layer of this pyramid.

Learn more about our pyramid of card makers: https://medium.com/cardstack/who-are-the-card-makers-504f784881fb
Check out our early-access guides: https://docs.cardstack.com/release/