AMA Recap with Polygon featuring Cartesi’s Chief Scientific Officer, Augusto Teixeira— Cartesi & Polygon Decentralized Poker Showcase

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Cartesi

10 min readApr 2, 2021

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

2/4/2021 — We’ve recently conducted an AMA in Polygon’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.

Arun Philips: Hello Augusto! Welcome to the Polygon community 🙂 Could you please tell us a little about yourself and how Cartesi came into being?

Augusto: So, my name is Augusto Teixeira. I come from a mathematics background, working as a researcher in probability theory. During my research, I have collaborated a lot with Serguei Popov, who is also a mathematician and one of the founders of IOTA.

During our interactions, Serguei and I discussed several problems in blockchain and he really managed to bring my energy into the subject. At some point, I came to him with an idea that I thought was revolutionary for the field and Serguei suggested me to start a company to implement the algorithm. At this point, I contacted Diego Nehab and Erick de Moura and this was the beginning of Cartesi.

Arun Philips: Super cool stuff, pleasure to have you here 🙌🏼 it’s been an amazing journey :)
Can you tell us a bit more about Cartesi’s offerings, the SDK and its features?

Augusto: Sure. Cartesi’s main objective is to bring the development tools of the centralized web into the decentralized world. For this, the first thing that we’ve implemented is a consensus algorithm for very intensive computations.

With our tech, one can run a computation on L2 involving trillions of operations and have it be proved correct on Ethereum or Polygon at a minimal cost.

Arun Philips: That’s really interesting and a much-needed innovation. What are the major milestones Cartesi has achieved so far and what can we expect from you guys in the future?

Augusto: One of the very important things that this enables is for people to develop smart contracts on Linux, using any programming language or library they want!

If developers want to start coding Linux applications for blockchain, please take a look into our SDK portal or contact us on Discord!

Arun Philips: Bringing more developers to Blockchain! Awesome 🔥

Augusto: Our first important milestone was implementing our consensus mechanism for intensive computations. This has been fully implemented already and it is able to run very intensive computations and reach a result on Ethereum or Polygon in a decentralized way, at negligible cost.

On another front, we have created a decentralized PoS selection mechanism that we are going to employ in other products.

What we are working on right now and we are very excited about is our Rollups solution. This will allow for lower fees even when running directly on Ethereum for example.

Arun Philips: This has so many applications! Brilliant work. Can’t wait to see what you guys have in store
With the Cartesi-Polygon Poker game due to be released soon, what do you wish to showcase to the game developers and gamers at large?

Augusto: Of course, we are also very excited about our joint work on the Poker game!

The Cartesi/Polygon Poker game is a showcase of what one can achieve when we join the low fees and fast txs of Polygon with the computational power of Cartesi (that is essential for the cryptography that protects the users cards during the match).

The logic of our Poker game has been developed fully in Linux, using mature C++ cryptography libraries.

We want to use this to showcase for all the non-blockchain developers out there (the tens of millions of them) that it is now possible to code decentralized applications with the tools they are accustomed with. Not having to worry about the crazy limitations of Ethereum’s fees or Solidity’s idiosyncrasies.

Arun Philips: This is truly an awesome vision! And we’re glad to be partnering with you guys on this 🚀
Can you tell us a little bit about how your experience was building on Polygon?

Augusto Teixeira: We are also really enjoying this partnership!

Of course.

The team at Polygon has taken the best possible approach with your tech. More precisely it was very important that you kept 100% compatibility with Ethereum’s code and tooling.

When we started to build our infrastructure, we decided to do our first version on top of Ethereum, because it was the most mature and because the fees were low at the time. When we realized that several of the applications we have envisioned for our tech were going to be gentrified away from Ethereum (who wants to play a game where every decision costs 30USD anyway?) we started looking for alternatives and Polygon fit like a glove.

It was a breeze to port our code to Polygon, everything that worked on Ethereum just worked on Polygon with minimal changes!

Arun Philips: This is really encouraging for us to hear 😀
Thank you for your feedback!
What will the future of Cartesi in the decentralized gaming revolution look like? Can you talk to us about your roadmap?

Augusto Teixeira: So, our ideas for the decentralized gaming revolution are not new actually.

When Ethereum started, all these ideas were already running in the community: have all games be decentralized, people would own their assets, servers would run forever, game mods would have economic incentives to make the game more fun, the community would participate in the decisions…

All of this is not new and has been envisioned by the early dreamers of blockchain tech.

But what we realized very soon is that these dreams would hit a very hard reality as soon as people started to develop these things. The lack of scalability and the limitations of the Ethereum EVM would kill this beautiful vision.

So we started working on fixing the issues even before they became apparent. As I said before, when we started our project, Ethereum’s fees were very reasonable and people would play games for fun on the network.

This sounds like a distant past now, but projects like Cartesi and Polygon are here to revive the old dream of a flourishing decentralized game industry!

Arun Philips: That’s very true. We’re already seeing how games are hungry for stronger infrastructure and it looks like you’re ready for the demand :)
Before we conclude, I think there are many in the community who would love to join the Cartesi community and stay up to date with all the news. What’s the best way to keep in touch?

Augusto Teixeira: Send them in! Hehe

Arun Philips: Follow the Cartesi Project here: https://t.me/CartesiProject

For a nice feed of news, Twitter:

https://www.twitter.com/cartesiproject

Community Round

Q1: Hi Mr. Augusto. What kind of encryption algorithms does Cartesi’s Cartesi Compute SDK use in terms of software stacks and computation and what is the role of encryption algorithms in the games you prepare, for example in the poker game? Why is the encryption algorithm important?

Augusto Teixeira: So, we use standard cryptography algorithms for Mental Poker. So, actually, the problem of decentralizing Poker is much older than one would think (much older than blockchain for example). The team that created the first public cryptography system (RSA) also worked on this problem and came up with a nice solution.

We are using a more modern version of mental poker that is safer in many ways. This would have been impossible to code directly on Solidity. We instead used a classical C++ library for the job.

Q2: We have seen the Creepts game. Is it possible that we can see high-quality open world or MMORPG games on Cartesi in the future?

Augusto Teixeira: MMORPGs are always in our minds of course. We grew up playing them and we would love to see a decentralized version of this.

There are some extra challenges that need to be solved for this to be possible. But depending on the game specs, we are very close.

One thing that would be very important is that we can’t have real-time interactions yet. Polygon is probably the fastest chain out there and the blocks are arriving every second. If the game is not so fast-paced, then I think we are in a good position to start coding it very soon!

Q3: How long has the Poker game prepared by Cartesi Compute SDK developed? Why did you choose to work on Polygon’s PoS Chain for the game’s infrastructure, and what are the advantages Polygon’s PoS Chain provides to Cartesi Compute SDK?

Augusto Teixeira: We have been working on the Poker game for something like four months. We are not a game studio, so it took us some time to figure out some very basic things and we are also not fully dedicated to the project.

I think that an experienced game studio would be much faster in that :)

The importance of Polygon cannot be overstated. A game like poker requires people to interact quite a bit, right? Betting, raising, folding, showing cards. On Ethereum, each of these interactions would take minutes and would cost ~20USD… This kills the fun of the game.

The combination of Cartesi and Polygon is perfect. Cartesi scaling computations and Polygon scaling transactions.

Q4: How is the storage of big data done in Cartesi, is it decentralized or are there other options?

Augusto Teixeira: Data is an extremely interesting subject.

Of course, nobody wants to use Ethereum to store data at the current costs. So, there are several steps one can take to reduce this limitation:

- first, move data from storage to call data. This has been implemented by us already and reduces the cost by 100x. Still very expensive on Ethereum

- moving the application to Matic would further reduce the cost, especially if using our call data trick.

- when Ethereum launches sharding, it will also increase the volume and reduce the cost of data.

But what we are most excited about is our Side Chain. It is fully specialized in short-term data storage and it is going to make a huge difference in this!

Q5: In your opinion, what are the barriers that make it difficult for businesses to adopt the usage of blockchain? What makes your project so friendly for individuals and businesses?

Augusto Teixeira: I think the biggest barrier is how alien the blockchain tech looks in the eyes of traditional developers.

This weirdness has so many facets: fees, limitations in computation, delays in transactions, strange programming languages, unstable tools…

We want to break most of these barriers for the developers first. Then they will be able to break the barriers for the final users.

We break these limitations by increasing the computational power of smart contracts and allowing people to program in their natural environment (Linux, python, C++, JS…).

Q6: Right now issuing a token is a rather simple process. However, building the system and ecosystem is the most difficult part. My question is, How will the demand of the token will increase and how will this token use within the ecosystem?

Augusto Teixeira: The barriers that we are breaking now will greatly expand what is possible in the blockchain. But applications are resource hungry and they always want to expand.

If applications want more data (and they will) they will likely want to benefit from our Side Chain.

If applications want to inter-operate with one another, they will need to have a notion of gas and a market for computations…

This is how our tokens will be important for applications.

Q7: What exactly are the two types of partnerships Cartesi has developed? What are the advantages of Layer 2?
Why do you support Layer 2 scalability solutions and which Layer 1 projects do you associate with?

Augusto Teixeira: We are partnering with several projects: Polygon of course :), Avalanche, IOTA, Elrond…

All of these partnerships are important because we believe that blockchain tech is not going to be a “winner takes all” type of scenario.

People like to point out for example that Intel won the hardware competition. This could not be further from the truth. AMD, NVidia, SanDisk… there are many many companies involved in building a computer. The thing is that they build different parts.

The same will be true for the decentralized web.

The importance of Layer 2 is very simple. Every improvement one can do on Layer 1 also improves Layer 2. So, there will always be a need for better Layer 2 solutions.

Q8: Do you have plans for hackathon so as to check the security of your ecosytem periodically and also invite developers to build?

Augusto Teixeira: Sure!

We had an incubation program to invite people to build things on our tech and we are going to run another round of incubation.

Soon we will also work on a bug bounty program to stimulate people to try to hack our system.

Let us know on Discord if you would be interested!

Q9: What changes will happen in the smart contract development plans for Cartesi in the next 5 years?
How will cart ensure sustainability and will Cartesi support smart contracts running on Linux in the next 5 years?

Augusto Teixeira: Wow, 5 years is very difficult to predict, hehe…

This tech changes every two months, so we are constantly re-evaluating our decisions to be able to make the biggest possible impact in the ecosystem.

But if we are to dream a bit about a longer-term vision. I would love to see Cartesi reach a point that people just use decentralized applications without even realizing it. Several of the apps one has in their smartphones just become decentralized and people enjoy the benefits without having to be tech-inclined or anything.

For this, we would need many things to be built, starting from our Rollups solution, then our Side Chain and better integration. Good tooling, hybrid architectures, UX and wallet improvements…

Q10: What problems does Cartesi plan to tackle to build the bridge between mainstream and blockchain?
What kind of background work does Cartesi do for developers to code central applications? What future do you prepare for developers?

Augusto Teixeira: This bridge between mainstream and blockchain development is our first focus.

We started providing the Linux environment. But there are several things to do still in terms of tooling: port a more mainstream distribution like Fedora for example to our virtual machine, provide something like Docker containers for developers…

If I were to give a pictorial description of what we want to deliver, it would be this.

Write your application just as if it was to be launched on AWS or Google Cloud. Then you enter our website, chose the blockchain you want to deploy, some configurations and just launch.

This is of course not accurate, but it is the direction we want to move to.

Arun Philips: Thank you for answering all the questions patiently Augusto :)

Augusto Teixeira: It was my pleasure.

Thank you all from the community for such nice questions and for the interest you have in the tech!

Cartesi’s Ecosystem Links:

Website: https://cartesi.io

Explorer: https://explorer.cartesi.io

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject

Telegram: https://t.me/cartesiproject

Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/cartesiannouncements

Discord (Development Community): https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS

GitHub: https://github.com/cartesi