CardLoop

TCG trading suffers from inconsistent condition descriptions, weak evidence in disputes, and distrust around high-value single transactions — made worse once global reach and local handover have to coexist in the same system. CardLoop pursues this deliberately as a solo effort built from the ground up: domain model, compliance, and payment analysis first, implementation second, rather than UI first and business logic afterward.

Marketplace payments (split payments to sellers) and SaaS billing (premium subscriptions, scan credits) are deliberately modeled as two separate domains with their own provider abstraction, not as one system — a documented evaluation of Adyen for Platforms, Stripe Connect, and Stripe Billing against split-payment capability, KYC/KYB, and usage billing precedes the provider choice, before any contract or compliance sign-off even exists. A real finding from ongoing development: scans, auctions, premium/billing, and protection were running into a NetworkError through a dead feature-flag mechanism in local dev, instead of a working mock state — fixed with one explicit mock flag per domain instead of a single global switch. On the identity side, there was a deliberate course change: instead of fully migrating the marketplace logic already modeled in Eloquent, policies, and Filament resources over to Supabase/Appwrite, Laravel remains the sole system of record for business data — Appwrite supplies only identity and browser session, and a server-side, Appwrite-verified JWT synchronizes the local users row.

Laravel 12 with PHP 8.4 as a monolith-first API backbone with clear domain boundaries (listings, orders, fees, billing, risk, scans, auctions), PostgreSQL, Redis for cache/locks/queues, Filament for the admin panel. Frontend as a React 18/TypeScript application with Vite, Tailwind CSS, and TanStack Query; a documented mock architecture encapsulates all data access behind src/lib/api/*, so the gradual switch from mock data to real endpoints leaves page structure and components unchanged. A commit in June 2026 moved the core flows — auth, marketplace search, watchlist, cart, checkout, orders, seller dashboard, uploads — from that mock state onto real Laravel API calls; scans, auctions, premium/billing, and protection are deliberately still mock-only.

All commits are by Felix Schattenberg, built solo: domain model, compliance and payment-provider analysis, Laravel backend including the Filament admin, React/TypeScript frontend with a documented mock-to-API architecture, Appwrite identity integration.