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Cartesi

5 min readFeb 3, 2021

TL;DR;
2020 was a very significant year for Cartesi. With the release of the Cartesi Machine (Cartesi’s VM) and a decentralized computational oracle (Descartes), the Cartesi team is now dedicated to implementing "optimistic rollups with interactive dispute resolution". That will not only allow for scalable smart contracts but developers will also be able to code smart contracts with mainstream software components on top of a Linux VM.
Most of Cartesi’s technical effort this year will be toward bringing this implementation to Mainnet. We will also take important steps regarding the PoS system and Noether. This is our updated R&D roadmap for 2021:
Q1
- Descartes SDK v1.0
- Noether's PoS v1.1
Q2
- Cartesi Rollups on Testnet
- Noether's PoS v2.0, supporting delegation
- Noether's on-chain infrastructure
Second Semester
- Rollups aggregator service
- Rollups validator marketplace
- Descartes v2.0: Cartesi Rollups on Mainnet

2020’s Achievements

On April 13, Cartesi successfully conducted an Initial Exchange Offering for CTSI on Binance Launchpad, and it was remembered by many for the exciting Creepts tournaments we ran with the communities, having more than 168,000 Creepts games played by over 27,000 unique players.

Creepts was the first demo showing what Cartesi intended to achieve: running heavy computational tasks on Linux in a decentralized way while keeping the blockchain’s strong security guarantees.

During Creepts’ euphoria, we reviewed our whole system design and implementation. On the one hand, we were happy that we successfully achieved a significant proof of concept. Namely, we were able to run billions of microprocessor instructions using Typescript on Linux, in a decentralized way, preserving the security of Ethereum.

On the other hand, Creepts was still a proof-of-concept project. The way it was built with the various components of our infrastructure was something hard for developers to grasp. At that time, we went through much-needed software redesign and architecture discussions until we set the correct direction for Cartesi’s infrastructure. The result was our first product, Descartes.

That software engineering task force happened amidst the pandemic’s chaotic onset, which disturbed and challenged most human beings’ lives, including our team members. Throughout that time, we remained strictly focused on finishing the first version of the product in time.

In Q2 2020, we concluded the implementation and launched comprehensive documentation on Descartes’ SDK portal. Descartes is a decentralized computational oracle for verifiable and enforceable computations running on a Linux VM. With our first product released, we moved forward bootstrapping the SDK by launching the DApp Incubation Program, a hackathon run in partnership with Gitcoin.

The program funded three projects. At the current moment, they have progressed significantly toward their objectives using Descartes and the Cartesi Machine. The second part of the program starts soon, with these teams participating in the quadratic funding organized by Gitcoin, with the initial matching funds provided by the Cartesi Foundation.

In Q3 2020 we began work on the implementation of Noether, our side chain for data availability, alongside the design of a future novel staking system that will later be implemented on our PoS system in 2022. The CTSI Macroeconomy when eventually implemented will solve some of the problems that Ethereum has been facing as a result of high DeFi yields.

Towards the end of 2020, we released the first version of our PoS system and CTSI Reserve Mining on Mainnet. Today we have over 36M CTSI staked with a participation rate of 14% and growing.

Positioning

Cartesi is uniquely positioned to transform how developers build smart contracts and DApps.

Throughout 2020, rollups gained significant projection as a favorite layer-2 approach to scale Ethereum and other blockchains supporting smart contracts. Cartesi would have a critical role to play in this space.

The timing is also critical, as we see an explosive demand on DeFi hitting the hard wall of Ethereum’s block size and the astronomical transaction fees.

Other “rollups” implementations will come to Ethereum Mainnet soon, and several DApps will start to migrate. A few rollups solutions will thrive and co-exist with Cartesi. For Cartesi’s infrastructure, it is necessary to highlight the unique technological advantages that will be pivotal to many applications and developers in our specific case.

Cartesi Rollups

We are currently working on updating the system that will support Optimistic Rollups with interactive dispute resolution. Our implementation contributes directly to smart contract scalability’s pressing issue, especially by running off-chain heavy computation that would be impossible to run on-chain. That will allow for million-fold computational scaling without loss to the strong security guarantees of Ethereum.

On its own, that would be useful enough. But something else makes Cartesi’s system remarkable. With Cartesi Rollups, smart contracts run off-chain on Cartesi Machines. Since these support Linux, developers have the option to dispense with Solidity and the limitations of the EVM to create smart contracts with myriad mainstream software stacks, toolchains, standard libraries, file systems, and other OS resources. Running smart contracts on a deterministic Linux runtime has never before been possible. For the first time, developers will have an entire operating system for smart contracts.

This brings us much closer to what we can call a real decentralized computer with an actual operating system, ready to run computational tasks other than the trivially simple ones that blockchains can support.

Tooling

Our main objective is to get to an early implementation of Cartesi Rollups by Q2 2021, followed by the required QA cycle, auditing, and improvements that will lead to a Mainnet release later this year.

However, developers will need more than that. Besides coding scalable (Linux-based) smart contracts with the infrastructure we will provide, they also need tools to deploy and monitor DApps. The team will put an emphasis on these ancillary projects that will, in essence, tackle usability to optimize adoption.

The most important projects comprising tooling are an aggregator service for Cartesi Rollups; a validator marketplace (briefly mentioned in the rollups article); and new features added to the Cartesi Explorer to support Cartesi Rollups and the validator marketplace. More information on these projects will be given in future articles.