AMA Recap with Elrond Network featuring Augusto Teixeira, Chief Scientific Officer at Cartesi

Colin Steil

Published in

Cartesi

10 min readFeb 15, 2021

As of 2022 Descartes has now been renamed as Cartesi Compute.

15/2/2021 — We’ve recently conducted an AMA in

Elrond Network

’s Telegram Community in light of our recent partnership announcement. The AMA was held with Augusto Teixeira, Chief Scientific Officer at Cartesi.

Note: some of the text may have been edited for clarity and grammar.

Elrond Admin: 🤝 We are excited to start the AMA with Cartesi and our guest for today is Augusto Teixeira, CSO at Cartesi. Please welcome Augusto!

Augusto: Thanks Michael for having me here!

Elrond Admin: Welcome! Let’s start with a short introduction, tell us how did you discover blockchain and what motivated you to start working on Cartesi?

Augusto: Thanks. Elrond and Cartesi have so much in common. It is very exciting to start this partnership!

I have always been an enthusiast for technology related to digital freedom.

But what really brought me close to blockchain was a long term friend of mine Serguei Popov (one of the founders of IOTA).

We always discussed interesting technical problems in the field and at some point I decided to partner with Erick and Diego to build something really new based on those discussions.

Elrond Admin: That is an amazing story! Very similar to ours!

Q1: You seem to solve problems that Elrond almost doesn’t have: speed and scalability. However, you can solve something quite important for us: dev speed and accessibility. How do you see this integration going on in this respect?

Augusto: So, one of the main problems with blockchains that support smart contracts is that they have to start building a Virtual Machine (VM).

These are little computers that execute the logic of smart contracts. But it is very important that they behave deterministically (to reach consensus).

In the search for our VM, we spent a lot of time and decided to chose a real architecture, called RISC-V.

This allows us not only to run little programs (like those in simple smart contracts). But anything that runs on modern computers, using a Linux operating system.

This allows for devs to feel at home, use any language or library, import legacy code.

Q2: What can Cartesi bring to Maiar and Elrond network?

Augusto: So there are two things that we can bring to the table:

One as I said is the ability to run logic on Linux, using anything the developer wants. This is for example what made the fast growth of App Store and Google Play possible.

Second, we also allow for people to decide to move some of the computation away from the global consensus. Although Elrond is much faster than other blockchains, doing this will allow for even greater speeds. And trust me, there is no limit to how much computing power applications would like to access.

Elrond Admin: The second part is so true, being flexible and adaptable is something that every network should take into consideration. The winners of the web 2.0 era managed to do that and so will the winners of web3 be!

Q3: My first question is mainly for the community as we have a lot of newcomers to the group and the crypto space as a whole, can you explain in simplistic terms what Cartesi does and how it will benefit the end user?

Augusto: This is probably the best starting point. Cartesi is a Rollups solution. This means that all the transactions happen in the underlying blockchain (in this case Elrond), but intensive computations can run outside, allowing for greater scalability and also allowing for different architectures (in this case our Linux enabled VM).

From time to time, someone posts on the main chain what are the outcomes of those computations (for example in order to enforce asset redistribution).

At this point, anyone can challenge this claim and in case of such disputes, only a few tiny cryptographic proofs are sent to the base layer in order to establish who was lying.

Elrond Admin: I see Cartesi really empower developers by adding support to linux & multiple coding languages for SCs. How is it done? Will devs need to run a Cartesi node to make their DApps execute faster?

Augusto: There are several possibilities for the nodes to execute.

The most paranoid version would be: every person interested in this application has to run a node for themselves. This will guarantee that they never get a false outcome on the main chain.

The other extreme, would be for people to trust some entity to run a node on their behalves. This would guarantee security as long as the chosen institution remains honest.

There are other scenarios as well in between.

Q4: Really curious to see the fee & speed comparison for ETH + CTSI L2 VS Elrond + CTSI L2

Augusto: There is really no question that the L1 being faster, more powerful and cheaper makes a gigantic difference in the types of applications that can be built.

People often talk about fees, because this is of course what hurts, right.

But another very useful perspective is to look at “possible applications”. Right now, Ethereum could not handle a decentralized Reddit, for example. The fees have essentially gentrified social applications and games out of Ethereum.

But in an environment like Elrond+Cartesi, not only we would have cheaper DeFi, but we could enable much more. In fact nobody is able to envision what creative devs will come up with.

Elrond Admin: Amazing! Very well said!

Q5: Where do you see Cartesi in the next 5/10 years?

Augusto: This is a very interesting question, because we have a meeting every quarter that we discuss our long term strategy. This is very important in order to stay in a firm path, but at the same time, it is funny to see how we change our perspective of things quite often as well.

For now I can say that this year will be devoted to releasing a working Linux Rollups solution and preparing the base for our Sidechain.

In the future, we can envision several tech advances, but what really matters is our main motto that remains unchanged:

We are here to enable a decentralized computer like AWS does in a centralized way.

We will of course not be alone in this task, that is why partnerships and integrations are so important. But we will provide the CPU for that thing.

Q6: Can you explain how Cartesi side chain works in comparison with let you know optimal rollup side chain?

Augusto: Our Sidechain will be another ingredient for our solution. People are not obliged to use it, but it will provide a high throughput channel for communication.

The biggest difference that our Sidechain has in comparison with other solutions is the design decision to make it garbage collected. So instead of having to sync 5TB of data to start running a node that (because you need to download the whole history of everything), we will allow for much greater file sizes, while keeping the total size small through frequent expiration of unnecessary content.

Q7: How long do you think it’ll take to have a functioning integration for Elrond?

Augusto: This is still being discussed, so it is hard to tell.

But we expect to have at least one dev and one team lead spearheading this project. So I am optimistic to see something happening this year.

Q8: How does Cartesi offer privacy for the data of the dApps ?

Augusto: When an application is running on Cartesi, only a hash of the machine is made public on the main chain. So only authorized people are able to see the contents of the computer.

But you are correct that the data that comes in and gets out is visible to everyone.

The easiest way to make the data also private is to encrypt it and have the key live inside the machine.

This leaves another question, how can you make the asset redistribution that happens in the L1 be also private? This can be done to a certain extent with ZK tech (that we can run on the main chain or on the Cartesi Machine).

Elrond Admin: Amazing breakdown, I think this will enable a lot of edge use cases, that haven’t been possible for blockchains so far, users value their privacy and thus it will be valuable to have it contained in certain cases.

Augusto: I am sorry if my answers are very technical sometimes. I am working much more close to the tech team, so we incorporate a lot of jargon. But please feel free to ask about anything that wasn’t clear as well.

Elrond Admin: They are amazing so far and very detailed, thank you!

Augusto: Thank you!

Q9: How can the Cartesi Compute oracle mitigate some of the DeFi attacks we have seen recently, where oracles were manipulated?

Augusto: There are several types of oracles and they require different types of strategies.

The first type of oracle is internal to the blockchain, like for example asking Uniswap for the cost of a certain coin.

This is very easy to manipulate (for example using a flash loan) because of the Uniswap team has optimized their code for simplicity and low gas cost.

But if you don’t have these strong gas cost limitations, you can keep track of average costs, “depth”, or even keep track of a whole order book.

Another type of oracle is concerned with information outside the blockchain, like Chainlink is building. These can improve with better partnerships. So for example, instead of having some company state the price of an asset, have Nasdaq or Bloomberg themselves publish this data.

In this front, Cartesi helps by allowing these companies to use their already existing signing technology (like hardware signing cards).

Q10: Can you offer us more details about existing Cartesi dApps and how are they working?

Augusto: When we first launched, we had a demo dApp, which was a tower defense game running on top of Ethereum. People could challenge each other for high scores and receive prizes. It was a very interesting experiment, although as I said before Ethereum’s high fees have made games impossible to run on there.

Since then, we are working on another game on Cartesi/Matic which will showcase more of our technology and integration capabilities.

Moreover we have three applications that are being published on our Incubation Program: a IoT app for carbon credits, a package manager for Cartesi Machines and a Market for Game Assets by SimThunder.

As soon as we have our Rollups solution rolling (sorry for the pun), we will enable much more powerful applications and we will run partnerships/incubation programs to showcase these.

Q11: Do the faster transaction fees make EGLD vulnerable to spam attacks or are there a plan in place to prevent this? Thanks

Augusto: We don’t introduce any change to the base layer we work on. So Elrond’s own spam control will remain functional.

The way in which we allow for faster txs is threefold:

- first transactions don’t need to be executed, only logged

- the results of these transactions don’t need to be stored on the underlying chain.

- these transactions can be bundled together and compressed using various mechanisms.

Just the last point alone is expected

to provide a 50–500 fold increase in scalability.

Augusto: There is an interesting point to be made about scalability on blockchains (and in computing in general).

Although it comes to the end-users as a single number (the fee) it has actually several components.

Just to mention a few:

- how many computing cycles can you execute per second (remember when computers were measured by MHz?)

- how much data can you store (analogous to Hard Disk)

- how much data can you communicate (bandwidth).

All these play a role in the final fee we end up paying. And different solutions are required in order to improve each of these fronts.

Pushing a bit our analogy with computers, it is very similar there as well. We need a dedicated CPU, a HD, a RAM, a broadband connection… all these together is what took for the Silicon Valley revolution to take place.

In this analogy, we want to play the role of Intel or AMD.

Augusto: We have a demo on our website that includes a hello world in: Python, JS, Lua, C++, Rust (I may have forgotten some).

More importantly for devs, we can use existing libraries. So the old XKCD comic will make sense in Cartesi. People will program like this:

import fly

fly()

Q12: What role does the CTSI token play in the network?

Augusto: The Cartesi token is not mandatory in the rollups system. If you only want to use our Rollups solution, you can do it without CTSI, however it can be used by DApps to outsource the execution of verifiable and enforceable computation to entities running Cartesi Compute nodes.

It also becomes very important as devs want to add more massive data into their machines.

This will be done through our Sidechain, called Noether. Noether will be optimized for large blobs of data (like pictures) that can be garbage collected over time. This will become fundamental as one moves into a new era, where smart contracts really act as a true web server.

Elrond Admin: Amazing thank you!

We thank Augusto for being with us tonight for an awesome AMA!

🛠We are excited for our partnership with Cartesi that will bring the World’s Prevailing OS to the Internet Scale Blockchain: https://medium.com/cartesi/cartesi-partners-with-elrond-to-bring-the-worlds-prevailing-os-to-the-internet-scale-blockchain-af0fcba26b59

📰Stay up to date with Cartesi and it’s developments here:

https://www.cartesi.io/

https://t.me/cartesiannouncements

https://twitter.com/cartesiproject

https://medium.com/cartesi

Augusto: Thank you very much for the invitation.

Elrond Admin: You are welcome!

Augusto: And congratulations to the community for such good and authentic questions!

You’ve got a golden community here!