Traditional cloud services such as those run by Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are heavily centralized. The results of this are ever-increasing usages fees as few other platforms can compete with the cloud computing capabilities of these companies. Cardtrack believes that blockchain is the answer to this. By performing cloud functions on the blockchain, and rewarding miners and developers in a decentralized manner, the community themselves can compete on pricing. Software developers can be rewarded depending upon actual, verifiable usage of their dApps by users. In essence, a community alternative using the blockchain can be used to compete and perhaps even eclipse the capabilities of the major cloud-computing companies.
Usage statistics of any dApp are easily calculated since the dApp itself is based on the blockchain. Smart Contracts are automatically executed and payment is taken from the end-user depending upon their usage.
Users themselves on the platform will benefit since they will be in control of their own central "hub", which connects all of the dApps they are running in one central place and allows them to essentially "stack" them together, allowing various forms of flow control.
Development on the Cardstack platform will have an open-community, open-source focus. Essentially, governance models will be created for software projects, and the community, along with automatic algorithms, can determine the rewards to issue to which developers of a dApp based upon their contributions. Developers will have an incentive to keep their projects up to date since they'll continue to receive CARD tokens depending upon actual usage of their dApp, thus the "Software as a Service" model is heavily incentivized - developers have an actual interest in ensuring their programs remain functional and usable for continued rewards based upon actual usage statistics.
Cardstack itself it not just an idea either, as it has been in development for 3 years already, with a focus on building its core functionality. The aim of the ICO is to attract funding for further development, and to give incentive for developers and users to use the platform given the tokenomics of CARD. The Cardstack team has a wealth of experience from a number of different areas, with the founder himself in software development.
The full scope of Cardstack is difficult to cover in a single article, I strongly recommend you read their whitepaper which is extremely well-written.
The Cardstack ICO looks to be very fair and well designed, unlike most ICOs I've encountered. They've even gone to the trouble of setting up a foundation in a crypto-friendly country - Switzerland. The foundation, called Cardstack Foundation, is the one responsible for initiating the ICO. In addition to the ICO, Cardstack will be running a number of airdrops in order to encourage wide adoption of the platform.
Initial Supply At Genesis: 6,000,000,000 CARD
Maximum Supply Possible: 10,000,000,000 CARD
ICO Date: May 31st, 2018
ICO Base Price: ~$0.017 USD per CARD
Early contributors will receive a bonus of 20%, which seems fair and not too high, and yet still offers incentive to contribute early, leading credence to the project reaching its soft cap and beyond. A majority of tokens at genesis are planned to be distributed to end users, which is good to see. The team have a very fair low allocation of 15% of the tokens, with heavy vesting restrictions of 4 years beginning after Year 1.
As for the actual product itself, Cardstack has the potential to revolutionize open-source development as we know it by rewarding open-source developers through a decentralized and fair reward system that is decided by algorithmic dApp usage and decentralized community governance. The project offers a fair presentation as to how it aims to tackle the established cloud-computing competitors. The team certainly has a large battle to fight in wrestling market share from their main competitors - Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, and this is where I see a medium level of risk in the project. However if they do successfully pull this off, the implications could be deep for decentralized software development.
