AMA Recap with Avalanche (AVAX), featuring Cartesi’s CSO, Augusto Teixeira, PhD
18/3/2021 — We’ve recently conducted an AMA in Avalanche’s Telegram group in light of our recent integration announcement. The AMA was held with Augusto Teixeira, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Cartesi.
Note: Some of the text may have been edited for clarity and grammar.
Avalanche Admin: Thanks and welcome to the Avalanche AMA with Cartesi. Today’s AMA will feature Augusto Teixeira, Co-Founder & CSO at Cartesi. For this AMA, we will follow this schedule:
11:25AM to 11:45AM: Channel is open for Twitter questions (channel muted)
11:45AM to 12:00AM: Channel is open for Telegram questions (channel in slow mode 1 min)
12:00AM to 12:25PM: @augusto_t answers questions (channel muted)
Augusto: Hello everyone
Avalanche Admin: It’s great to have you! Before we dive into the questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to the Avalanche community, and share some background on your journey to found Cartesi?
Augusto: Sure, so my name is Augusto and originally I work as a professor in mathematics. Besides the obvious connection between my field of research and blockchain, I have always been concerned with digital freedom and individual liberties. So my interest in crypto has only grown from there.
One of my colleagues in the institute I work (Diego) is a Computer Engineer and we have always discussed the subject. But at some point, we realized that we were having some quite disruptive ideas. The desire to turn these ideas into reality is what marked the beginning of Cartesi!
Twitter Questions
Q1: What core improvement when it comes to developers approach can Cartesi offer to Avalanche community?
Augusto: So, right now, if a person just left a CS degree, they have learned a bunch of programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. They feel ready to create a new application that will revolutionize society.
But if they are interested in decentralization or blockchain tech, they will soon learn that all their knowledge is going to be useless now, since they have to work in very strange programming languages with few to no libraries available.
What Cartesi brings is a mainstream environment for the development of DApps.
Just like the iPhone made traditional development tools available to phones, we are making them available to blockchains.
Avalanche now included :)
Q2: In recent times, security/safety has been a very big challenge to even the most legit or solid projects. What are you doing differently from others that would prevent future attacks and how often do you do that? Thank you.
Augusto: In terms of security, we protect ourselves and our users in various ways. First, we use some of the best practices during the development phase (like through testing, cross-team reviews, security tools…). We spend as much effort in development as in testing and securing the application.
But after the code has been written, it still goes through a long process before reaching Mainnet status. For example, we make internal and external audits, we launch it on Testnet, we are working on bounty programs…
This is all very similar to what a serious project should be doing to guarantee security. But one thing that really differentiates us is our background in mathematics.
We mathematicians tend to be very rigorous in everything we do and I think this type of thinking has entered the company’s blood.
Q3: Can you list 1–2 important characteristics of #cartesi that put you ahead of your competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?
Augusto: Clearly, the main differentiator of our tech is the computational power that it brings to the underlying chain.
We bring an improvement of up to 10000x in terms of computational power to certain applications. This first means that DApps can run much more complex logic (like order books, compression, AI…).
But there is a second point that should be mentioned.
Not only we allow for this more complex logic to be written, but we also use this improved computing power to provide a full Linux operating system for the devs. This way they don’t have to write the complicated logic again in solidity. They can simply use the already existing tools, like unzip for example.
Q4: Recently Cartesi announced the New version of Noether, Can you tell us, what is Noether? What benefits will provide to the CTSI holders of new Noethers V1.1?
Augusto: Noether is a Sidechain that we are initially launching on Ethereum. This Sidechain is optimized to provide data availability for temporary contents, which is something very important for the applications that we envision.
Noether 1.1 is an important upgrade in our mechanism to select block producers. Once our Sidechain is fully operational, CTSI will be used to pay for data to be published in it.
Q5: Security and Privacy feature should be the top priority for any organization. How does CTSI use various methodologies to validate the participants? And also to protect the user-data’s privacy?
Augusto: Concerning validation, we are currently using a fixed set of validators chosen by the DApp developer. In this setup, if at least one of these validators is honest, the correct behavior will be enforced on-chain.
However, I am excited that will publish soon our specification of a fully un-permissioned version of our protocol. In this new version, any honest participant running a node will be able to enforce the right outcomes for everyone!
Q6: What are the innovative features of Cartesi in developing Dapps system? How will you able to recommend it to your future clients? Thank you
Augusto: As I mentioned before, the most innovative feature is the ability to develop DApps the same way as one develops traditional applications.
It should be noted that the centralized world is innovating very fast, creating applications at an ever-increasing pace.
The reason why they are able to do this is that they rely on 50 years of software development that has been done on top of “essentially the same” platform: PC.
These software tools and stacks have been used for Word Processing software, internet Browsers, smartphones, video games. All benefiting from the same history of development.
Now all blockchain projects are trying to force everyone to abandon this stack and move into a new machine architecture and use immature tools. We are changing that.
Besides, we also prepare the land for the other requirements that traditional developers will have as soon as they start playing with Linux on Blockchains. This is why we are building Noether as well.
Our mission is to allow the hundreds of millions of traditional developers out there to on-board onto blockchain with minimal friction.
Q7: Cartesi and Avalanche are working together, what is the vision and mission you want to achieve? Will there be any interesting events that Cartesi and Avalanche will do?
Augusto: The first step in our collaboration is to port our technology to Avalanche.
This will allow developers to run Linux DApps on top of Avalanche, with all the advantages that Avalanche gives in terms of fees and data scalability and all the computational power that we provide.
Then there are several directions in which this partnership could evolve. One idea I believe would be great: build applications that use this combination Cartesi+Avalanche in order to showcase the power it can have.
Q8: Cartesi helped alot to provide service for developers of small applications. It requires storage to operate normally. How can the developers store data and what are the other options for the types of applications?
Augusto: This is a very relevant question. The traditional software industry has thrived not only because they have good development tools, but also because they have big data centers with lots of storage available.
So the data that is used inside a Cartesi application can come from several different sources, depending on the requirements. For very mission-critical data (like signatures of high-value transactions…) one could simply put this data on the blockchain directly. The increased security outweighs the possible costs.
But we also provide DApps (through Noether) the possibility to store and handle much bigger (and cheaper) amounts of data. This is data that will be temporarily available and the DApp developer should be aware of this.
Q9: Smart contracts are prone to bugs, and recently three large new DeFi projects have been casualties of this, costing users money. How efficient and secure is your smart contract, and have you reviewed it by any outside party?
Augusto: As I mentioned in an earlier answer, we do very careful audits (both internal and external) of our code and we use several good practices when developing our tech.
But another security point that is important to mention is the security of applications running on top of Cartesi. This will be greatly enhanced by the fact that devs can now use traditional security tools when writing code. Formal methods, real-time operating systems, containerization, permission separation…
All these tools are absent to DApp developers in Solidity, but they are all available when you build on top of Cartesi.
Q10: Do you forsee any notable changes to your roadmap or product(s) with the introduction of ETH 2.0?
Augusto: Our roadmap is very much taking into consideration ETH 2.0.
The shards in Ethereum will provide much higher throughput of data inside their blockchain.
And as Vitalik mentioned, this is a perfect combination for rollups solutions. In our case for example we can join the improvement on data availability provided by the shards with our computational scalability to deliver a solid platform for DApps to rely on.
Avalanche Admin: Thank you for answering these questions from Twitter @augusto_t!
Now, we will unmute the channel and take the community’s questions for a few minutes as it’s already been an hour
Augusto: Sure!
Live Community Round
Q1: I think a lot of people here are pretty interested in the $CTSI token, both the utility and structure… How does $CTSI work as a utility token for the network and how does it benefit both the network and holders?
Augusto: So the CTSI token is used for different purposes in different parts of our Tech.
The main utility of our token is to run our Noether sidechain. We have just launched its 1.1 version that greatly improves our mechanism to select block producers. The importance of our sidechain is to provide short-lived data to DApps. This will allow for much cheaper and more massive data streams to enter our Cartesi DApps.
Another important use of CTSI is for computational metering of un-permissioned applications. We have not announced this just yet, so I will not enter much into details, but it is something very exciting that we are going to bring soon!
Q2: New and old users are valuable to any community, you could tell me. What method/strategy does the Cartesi community use to get the majority of users to choose your project over many other projects in the blockchain space? What is it that gives the Cartesi project that unique touch over so many projects that are currently in the blockchain space? Is there a specific secret for it?
Augusto: We had a difficult time explaining what Cartesi does to the community in the first year of our project.
But after interacting a lot with our members, both on Telegram and Discord, we are now much more in sync with them.
If I were to pinpoint what is the most important aspect of this evolution is: to make your community dream the same dreams you have.
So we have always envisioned DApps built with traditional tools, now our community does the same. We have always said that rollups solutions are going to be extremely relevant to the future of blockchain, now our community sees it.
Q3: Any recommendations to get involved in cartesi activities? Who can participate in the development of the ecosystem and what options do the communities have to implement investment methods with the native currency?
Augusto: For development conversations, our Discord channel is by far the best place to get started. We have seasoned developers actively participating there and answering questions concerning our tech.
For more general discussions, Telegram would be a better fit (both the official and unofficial channels depending on the type of discussions).
Q4: Can you give us 3 reasons why us users should choose your project? What are the benefits your project might bring in the long run?
Augusto: We are working non-stop to be the App Store of blockchains. We are looking at all the things that need to be in place for this to be a reality soon.
When our platform becomes the default place for people to launch decentralized applications, the users will benefit from this vision becoming true.
Just like users and investors in Apple were all very happy with the outcomes of the iPhone for example.
Q5: Does Cartesi work on an educational program to reach out to the community? What role does it play and how can the community influence to further promote the project?
Augusto: We run incubation programs where developers can build proofs of concepts inside our platform with close help from our team and some financial support.
Besides these programs, anyone who enters our discord channels will be received by a team of very helpful developers with deep experience in our tech.
Don’t forget our documentation page as well, which goes through details of what we do and how to get things to work!
Avalanche Admin: Thank you so much for taking your time to answer these questions @augusto_t. It was great to have you here!
Augusto: Thank you, Nicolas, it was a pleasure for me. Thanks also to the community for the questions and engagement! I’m very much looking forward to what our partnership has to offer.
Congratulations to the Avalanche team for the amazing tech and such a nice community!
Thank you all and have a great day!
Cartesi Ecosystem Links:
Website: https://cartesi.io
Explorer: https://explorer.cartesi.io
Discord (Development Community): https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject
Telegram: https://t.me/cartesiproject
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/cartesiannouncements
GitHub: https://github.com/cartesi
