AMA Recap — Cartesi Telegram Community
As of 2022 Descartes has now been renamed as Cartesi Compute.
We’ve recently conducted an AMA in our very own Telegram Community. The AMA was held with Erick De Moura (CEO of Cartesi) and Colin Steil (COO of Cartesi) and moderated by Tilia Karadjinova (Digital Marketing Manager). Some of the text may have been edited for clarity and grammar.
Tilia — 👋 Hello and welcome everybody to the first AMA Telegram hosted by Cartesi in our own community! For one hour, the Cartesi co-founders Erick de Moura and Colin Steil will be answering questions posted by you and the top 10 chosen questions will share a reward of 200 USD in CTSI! 🥳
So before we put the show on track, we would like to give a couple of words about us and introduce ourselves.
Thanks for joining!
Tilia — I will start first! I recently joined the Cartesi team and I am very happy to meet all of you! I have a background in digital marketing and community management for tech companies focused on privacy and open-source software. My passion is Blockchain development while creating engaging content and growing communities.
Next, we have Erick de Moura and Colin Steil!
Colin — Hey all, excited to be here!
Colin — I’m Colin, Co-Founder and COO of Cartesi. I am a previous venture capitalist and start-up founder with a passion to make blockchain a reality. I have an expertise in execution and years of experience in community building and business operations across the globe. It’s a pleasure to be here and take part in the AMA!
Erick — Hello everyone! I’m Erick, Founder and CEO of Cartesi. I’m a software lead and engineer veteran who worked for different industries and was involved or responsible for the success of production-ready systems. It’s been 20+ years of experience, which granted me a mature view of the software business, system design and development processes. For three years, blockchain tech became a passion of mine.
Erick — Thanks for being here. I am glad to discuss Cartesi with you.
Tilia — We’ll start with a brief introduction about the project and then you will be able to ask us LIVE anything regarding Cartesi. Erick, could you please start with an intro about Cartesi?
Erick — Yes.
As you probably know by now, Cartesi is bridging mainstream software tech with the blockchain world. We call it the Operating System for DApps.
The most important asset for Cartesi is a team of very strong researchers and engineers extremely excited to create and implement novelty in the blockchain space.
Scalability is a multidimensional problem. First, with Cartesi Compute we empower computation.
It’s a powerful general-purpose decentralized computational oracle.
With the upcoming roll-ups, we can essentially have smart contracts being implemented with Linux and mainstream software.
With the side chain, we can achieve higher throughput and cost-effective messaging and storage. It will be a Cartesi-optimized data availability oracle.
With all these systems in place, we get something that could be analogous to general-purpose Linux servers, however, decentralized and with the same security guarantees that the blockchain provides.
Tilia — Thanks for that exciting intro, Erick!
It’s now time for your questions! We’ll be unmuting the Telegram group and you’ll have a few minutes to ask whatever questions you want.
Erick and Colin will be answering up to 10 questions each round. We’ll have multiple rounds to ensure everyone gets a chance to ask questions.
Q1. Which projects will take part in the Cartesi DApp Incubation Program? From which economic sectors? What are the expectations for the Cartesi projects from their developement?
Erick — Hey, thanks. We initially proposed gaming and DeFi, as they are the more obvious directions to go first. However, Cartesi can be applied to any industry that wants to benefit from public blockchains. We are being surprised by people coming with interesting ideas involving IoT and other fundamental computer science technologies. Some of these confirm early hypotheses we always had about the use cases of the project.
Q2. Can you tell us a little about your biggest achievement this year, what are you working on right now? What would you like to say through the AMA today?
Colin — For sure! Good question. During 2020 we’ve achieved a lot within Cartesi as explained through all of our development and monthly updates.
We’ve had an action-packed year that included being launched on Binance Launchpad, growing our team tremendously (we are nearing 20 people now!), releasing Creepts — the first fully decentralized tower defense tournament game, listing a multitude of top centralized and decentralized exchanges, and significant technology advancements according to our roadmap (including the most recent PoS release).
One of the achievements we are the most excited about was our release and upgrades to Cartesi’s Cartesi Compute SDK. Cartesi Compute SDK opens up a world of possibilities for developers that empowers computation for blockchain applications. We have worked hard on the documentation for this, as well as have given a variety of tutorials to see exactly how it works.
I encourage everyone to check it out and even try the tutorials yourself. You can learn more here! https://cartesi.io/docs
Q3. Staking and DeFi are very popular in the crypto space…are there any ideas to implement DeFi and a staking program in CARTESI?
Erick — We certainly have staking and it’s coming soon. It’s a fundamental piece of the tech playing a role in how we will ensure decentralization. We published our Macroeconomy article about it recently. And very soon we will release more practical instructions about the upcoming staking and management of the mine reserve.
Cartesi is a powerful infrastructure for DeFi. We are committed to developing infrastructure and we will deliver something that is going to be very useful for the next generation of more complex DeFi applications. We will not only provide the tech, the support, but also incentive programs down the line.
Q4. What we know is that collaboration in the industry is very crucial in order to survive and dominate in the long term. What kind of collaboration has been made by CARTESI (CTSI)?
Colin — We agree and have recently onboarded a business development team to help us in these efforts and to ensure we are gathering meaningful partnerships at the forefront of the industry.
We have already established important partnerships with projects such as Matic Network, where things are evolving very nicely. I encourage everyone to attend our panel we’ll be holding on October 8 at 3:00 PM GMT in collaboration with Gitcoin and Matic (https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements/216).
Most recently, we’ve partnered with Binance Smart Chain (https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements/211). This is an important partnership for us, as we’re showing the advantages and interoperability features of Cartesi. DApp developers will eventually be totally isolated from the idiosyncrasies of the blockchain and will be able to deploy on any relevant and major blockchain of their choice. They will also not have to worry about spending all their time developing for a blockchain that may fail in the future. Currently, DApp developers can deploy Cartesi DApps on 3 networks: Ethereum, Matic, and Binance Smart Chain. Learn more here: https://cartesi.io/en/docs/descartes/supported-networks/
Q5. We all know that the Ethereum Network has many problems: scalability issues, high gas fees, slow speeds, and many more. So, why did you choose to build your token on ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not build it on some scalable blockchain instead as Ethereum?
Colin — Indeed! This is a feature of Cartesi we are very excited about as we are blockchain agnostic. As mentioned in my previous answer, we’ve already started this initiative. I encourage you to check out our supported networks: https://cartesi.io/en/docs/descartes/supported-networks/
Q6. There we see many projects that claims they are fully Decentralized. But they done their work in a Centralized way. How can we sure that the current coin is fully Decentralized? Can you please tell us what’s fact’s working method?
What do you think about Defi in 5 to 10 years? How can your crypto play a part in making DeFi available for Regular People, especially the Unbanked and Underbanked?
Erick — There are two questions here. Let’s address the first one first. Cartesi’s vision is to make decentralization efficient, useful, and adoptable by a wide range of developers and businesses. If you read our whitepaper and documentation on our documentation portal, you will see how careful we are in maintaining decentralization and security.
Without preserving decentralization a project like Cartesi has no value.
The second one: right now there are lots of DeFi games and experimentation going on, with the good and bad sides of it. It is, nevertheless, fostering innovation and novelty. In 5 years, the ecosystem should be much more mature with much more complex financial systems, involving security tokens and a lot of composability among DApps. Cartesi will become more and more relevant with that, as these DApps tend to get more complex and mainstream developers start to build financial applications for blockchains.
Q7. What your plans in place for global expansion, is #CARTESI focusing on only one market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships?
Colin — Thanks for the question! As mentioned, we’ve just announced a multitude of actions in this direction. We’ll be heavily focusing on expanding our global presence, as well as securing partnerships and users of our technology.
1) We’ve recently launched the Cartesi DApp Incubation Program that is on-going. We encourage anyone interested in building on Cartesi to apply before October 12! https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/cartesi-incubator/onboard
2) We’ve onboarded a business development team to help secure partnerships and grow our presence with important organizations. You can learn more in our monthly recap: https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements/213
3) We’ve re-launched our ambassadorial program and will be looking to grow exponentially into different regions. If you’re interested in becoming an ambassador for Cartesi, please do check out our renewed website and submit an application! https://cartesi.io/ambassadors/
Erick — Cartesi has recently delivered its first product (Cartesi Compute) and it will advance further soon with roll-ups. We have now a good ground to start reaching out to developers. That we are doing through the Incubation program and other initiatives with several research groups on different universities around the world. There are important development partnerships shaping up now that will give great capabilities for blockchain games. We are fully committed to using all business development and expansion techniques that are compatible with each stage of the products Cartesi is working on.
Tilia — We’ll open the chat for another round!
Colin — Thanks for the questions! We’ll now select some to answer from the second round 🙂
Tilia — Wow, great questions! 👏 Let’s give a couple of moments for Erick and Colin to answer.
Erick — The Cartesi Foundation is a non-profit organization that is committed to building and delivering its vision. We are very transparent on the way we manage our assets, as people can see from our transparency reports. One can see that
the Foundation has the fuel it needs to build all the envisioned infrastructure.
We have a relatively small team made of only very competent individuals (engineers, researchers, business developers and marketing) and proper management of our expenses.
As Cartesi’s ecosystem develops with many DApps being implemented on our network, that will create a positive spiral in the utility of the token, more and more significant partnerships and products being developed.
Q8. 2020 is the year of Defi and Farming yield, so does Cartesipredict that 2021 will be a trend of any field? And what is the strategy to keep Cartesifrom falling behind?
Erick — Cartesi is not in the yield farming business. Specific hypes will come and go, and Cartesi will remain relevant and unique, providing the first industry-grade infrastructure for DApps that support an actual Operating System.
Q9. We now know that there are so many crypto developments in the NFT and defi gaming sector, can you explain why we had to choose CTSI as a place to invest? What guarantees and benefits will be provided?
Colin — That’s a great question, as the market as rapidly changed over the past couple of months and users have a variety of choices and projects that they can choose to follow.
In regards to Cartesi, we are highly confident in our technology and vision — there is no other project that has the long term potential in making DApps and blockchains mainstream than us. As Erick mentioned in our intro, the most important asset for Cartesi is a team of very strong researchers and engineers extremely excited to create and implement novelty in the blockchain space.
Cartesi is all about bridging the mainstream software tech with the blockchain world. With all these systems in place, we get something that could be analogous to general-purpose Linux servers, however, decentralized and with the same security guarantees that the blockchain provides.
Not only this, but Cartesi can enable much more complex DeFi and NFT DApps that will be very exciting as the industry evolves.
We’re working day and night on making all of this a reality and we have something very special coming this quarter — the initial launch of the Cartesi Network and our “Mining on Mainnet.” We’ll be releasing more details on this very soon, but we are excited to get our community involved and staking CTSI. In addition, we are extremely excited about our Macroeconomy that will launch in 2021. As you mentioned with the recent attention on DeFi, it poses a problem for PoS networks — whereas people would rather place their tokens in DeFi products to earn higher rewards. Our macroeconomy solution improves this greatly, as it has a varying reward curve and assumes no risk preferences for the user. I encourage everyone to read more about it here: https://medium.com/cartesi/the-ctsi-macroeconomy-ea60a35ab2f3
Pay close attention to our announcements channel for more upcoming info! https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements
Q10. Cartesi’s ambitions are huge. Cartesi wants to participate in many fields of the future. Is there any technology or a solid basis for you to fulfill Cartesi ‘s mission in so many fields?
Erick — There’s a very solid basis in the core infrastructure that we are delivering. We invite everyone to read our docs, audit/review our code and bring any technical doubts or concerns directly to us on Discord.
Q11. Could you tell us about the expectations for the partnership with Binance Smart Chain you made very recently?
Colin — Yes, for sure! That’s a great question and we are really excited about the partnership. Most importantly, it showcases the interoperability of Cartesi DApps — we are slowly isolating developers from the need to develop for one specific blockchain. With Cartesi, they can easily deploy it on any supported network.
Regarding Binance Smart Chain, its ecosystem is evolving very rapidly and also provides highly scalable TPS for DApp developers. We are expecting more projects to slowly launch on Binance Smart Chain, and we are ensuring Cartesi is there as an option to empower computation, as well as allow developers to use a full Linux environment when developing their next-generation DApps.
You can read more on the partnership here: https://medium.com/cartesi/cartesi-partners-with-binance-smart-chain-to-provide-high-computational-resources-and-a-6a251564c802
Q12. You organized an AMA session very rewarding and received a lot of questions related to utilities and technology, future vision, …So now I want to ask what do you want to receive from the community?
Erick — Your sincere thoughts, concerns and questions is all we want 😉
Q13. Does Cartesi only focus on gaming platforms? why not launch a mobile app to try out some of the new games launched by cartesi? and it would be great to have an in-game item trading market like any other gaming platform
Colin — Cartesi is a general infrastructure for all industries.
Gaming is one of our focuses as Cartesi’s first DApp is Creepts — a fully decentralized tower defence tournament game (https://creepts.cartesi.io). We are very excited about the future of blockchain gaming and that is why it’s the industry we’ve started with. We see a plethora of possibilities for Cartesi in creating games involving NFT’s or complex turn-based games that require lots of computation.
As a side note, we’ve recently joined the Blockchain Gaming Alliance as a member, and we’ll be at the forefront of the blockchain gaming industry. Watch for more exciting things to come from this as the scene develops.
Q14. What are the main benefits that CARTESI offers to developers? Why should developers consider CARTESI as the first choice?
Erick — Right now with Cartesi Compute, we solve a specific problem of computational scalability (computation oracle). With the roll-ups and the side chain, we will actually offer a very powerful alternative for DApp developers. Namely, instead of having to learn idiosyncratic tools and languages specific to blockchains, developers will develop DApps in a way that’s much closer to what desktop and mobile applications are developed. Besides the productivity boost by providing the software tools the industry gives through Linux, we will provide all the scalability benefits (computation, throughput and data) that are otherwise hampering adoption nowadays.
Tilia — We are going to open the chat for one last round!
Colin — Thanks guys! Last round, here we go with the answers! Fantastic questions, appreciate you all being here.
Q15. I’m a white-hat hacker on the internet, do you think the CARTESI system is secure enough from hackers? Does your project have a program that rewards individual vulnerability detection of the system?
Erick — We highly encourage people to check, audit and find bugs if they are able to. And yes, we will create specific bounty programs for bug hunting in the near future.
Q16. Regarding proof of stake/mining on mainnet in Q4, what wallets/exchanges will be supported for staking and will the rewards need to be claimed manually or airdropped?
Colin — Great question! We’re going to be releasing more information on this in the next few days, with details around our Mining on Mainnet and how it will work.
Initially, we’ll be hosting the nodes ourselves to allow anyone wanting to stake easy access from our staking dashboard. We’ll then be partnering with a multitude of exchanges and staking-as-a-service providers to expand the accessibility for our community.
At the current stage, the rewards will always be automatic (and will be sent to your address), users will never have to manually claim them.
Q17. What prompted you and your team to build up Cartesi? How the project is named as Cartesi? Any specific reason?
Erick — We wanted to be inspired by the name of famous philosophers. Cartesi Compute was the chosen one, because of all his thought about the duality of mind and body. We found the parallel on our tech that deals with a duality of on-chain and off-chain processings. Cartesi is a derivation of the word “Cartesian”. 😉
Q18. Tokens of projects plummeted prices, causing a lot of loss for investors. With $CTSI’s token, what will you do to make your project stable and bring the highest return to investors in the long run? What are the real strengths of the project?
Colin — We cannot comment on the price of CTSI, however, I ensure you we are committed to being fully transparent and are working very hard to achieve our reality. I recommend checking out our most recent monthly recap. We’ll be releasing our second transparency report in the coming day or two as well.
In addition, we’ve also recently onboarded a marketing team and we’re expanding our initiatives greatly towards this goal. Make sure to stay tuned for all of our recent updates in our announcements channel as we progress: https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements
Q19. Does the price of the token matter to you from an operational perspective, if the token price is $1 or $100?
Erick — The utility of the token won’t be affected by its price. Network fees and rewards are automatically adjusted under a free market operation.
Q20. Now, some projects have policies for their ambassadors to create a contribution and attract recognition for the project! So the Cartesi team plans to implement policies and incentives for your ambassadors?
Colin — For sure! We’ve outlined these expectations in our refreshed ambassador program. You can view the site here: https://cartesi.io/ambassadors
Q21. What about NFTs ? How will you consider using them?
Erick — Cartesi can be instrumental to the whole development of the NFT world. One of the things you can do as a game developer is to create fully decentralized games or virtual worlds where in-game assets can have their ownership computationally asserted by Cartesi.
Colin — Make sure to join our panel with Matic on October 8 at 3:00 PM GMT where we’ll be discussing Blockchain Games + NFT’s with them 🙂
https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements/216
Q22. What makes Cartesi standout in comparison to other blockchain projects?
Erick — Cartesi is not a blockchain, but a layer-2 infrastructure that will operate on top of the most relevant blockchains. It will in fact make the blockchains much more powerful, as we are starting to do with Ethereum, BSC and even other layer-2 chains like Matic.
Tilia — Thank you to both Erick and Colin for the answers. Great questions everyone!
This is the end of the Telegram AMA. However, please do not hesitate to reach us on Telegram and our other Cartesi channels, we are always happy to hear from you and answer your questions anytime.
It has been an exciting day! Thank you so much for joining, we appreciate your time!
Colin — Thank you all! It was a pleasure answering all of your questions. See you around in any of our channels.
Erick — Thanks everyone!
Cartesi’s Ecosystem Links:
Website: https://cartesi.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject
Telegram: https://t.me/cartesiproject
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS
GitHub: https://github.com/cartesi
