Cardstack — The Blockchain App Builder - Review

Technology today is exponentially growing helped by the adoption of blockchain technology while utilizing online ecommerce and applications. It is now possible for us to shop clothes, order food and even transfer money online with just a few clicks. The applications available today has made our lives so much better. We can even talk to someone who lives in a different continent without having to go there. However, we still long for that one great application which can do all these things for us.

The world is plagued with apps that do provide you with a rich experience but there is no one app which can do multiple things. Sure there are media apps where you can listen to songs, follow people, see their playlists and so forth. But there are very few true apps which can do multiple aspects at once.
• There are currently millions of apps in the app store. All these apps are restricted to just one use case. There are messaging apps that can be used only for messaging services. We end up using different apps for e-commerce and different for payments.
• There are many subscription-based cloud apps. However, each of these apps is used for different things. Subscription to videos and movies are different, subscription for music is different and so on.
There are many DApps on the blockchain, each with their own use case. To get the benefit of each of them we need to try them out separately. How do we deal with this problem? Here is where CardStack comes into the picture.

CardStack is an open-source project which provides the developers an SDK to build apps by mixing and matching the features of different apps and DApps. Its main aim is to provide the experience layer for the decentralized internet. People already are familiar with using apps on their mobile devices. They even use the cloud-based subscription services. However, blockchain is a new technology which is still in the early adopter phase.
CardStack connects different apps with the subscription-based services and also aims to become an app builder of sorts for Dapps. There are many users who don’t like centralization and many that don’t care about it. Using CardStack, users are free to choose the level of decentralization they want.

If the users want more decentralization, they can use a peer-to-peer network. In this case, the user’s computer has all the code and logic required for it to connect to the information it requires (be it blockchain or not) or they can run it as an app on their mobile devices which is connected to the DApps through the CardStack hub. Users can also run it as a web app that makes use of the hub again. This is required for mass adoption as people can access the app on the web itself.

Use Cases

Content Creation
Thanks to the ubiquity of modern technology, journalism can be established by anyone else armed with a mobile phone. In the era of mindless liking and sharing, instantaneous messaging, electronic updates and notifications, viral news, fake news and trolls, the role of traditional media houses is threatened by citizen journalists, who may not always provide the greatest content quality. Independent journalism and content creation need networked content management tools that give them room to experiment with new monetization, and amplification strategies. Cardstack aims to be a unified blockchain’s WordPress, Medium and BBC.

Rewarding music platforms
The music industry is growing, in a different path to 10 years ago. Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are usurping traditional ways to get music like buying CDs. Yet, musicians, especially songwriters and composers, are getting less money through their royalty checks than ever before. The problem in the music industry, which also occurs in other media forms like publishing we talked earlier, is that nobody knows who actually owns what. There may be multiple owners and artist’s revenue is spread out between the streaming service and artist’s staff. Cardstack is working to create a decentralized network, which tracks and versions song metadata on a blockchain, built on Intel’s Hyperledger Sawtooth. This is achieved through connecting to the enterprise systems that run the music business via plug-ins through the Cardstack Hub architecture

Conclusion
CardStack is a very ambitious project and is capable of making the ability to use blockchain related apps even better. The fact that many features can be added to a single app without having to worry about the paying many times for different services is very helpful. If implemented properly, it can change the whole app industry and also lead to the mass adoption of blockchain.