Cartesi Ecosystem Update 2023
A Glimpse into Mainnet and a New Era for the Cartesi Ecosystem
With Cartesi Rollups approaching a mainnet-ready stage, the Cartesi ecosystem is on the brink of a new era. With that, we’d like to provide a brief recap of what’s been happening and the exciting new initiatives currently underway.
Decentralization
Community Grants Program
Earlier this year Cartesi launched its Community Grants Program (CGP), a community-driven pilot program to expand the network of contributors building the Cartesi ecosystem. In a boost to CTSI token utility, the CPG gives those staking CTSI an active governance role in allocating grant program funding.
With 1M USD available for funding in 2023, builders seeking funding can check out the CGP review process, rules, and guidelines to get your applications submitted!
Look out for further community governance driven programs such as the Ecosystem Incentives Program mentioned below to be launched in the future.
Discord
In an effort to increase transparency, encourage idea sharing, foster greater collaboration, attract new contributors, and further grow the ecosystem, the Cartesi Foundation is actively encouraging all grantees to migrate more technical discussions to public discord channels.
In addition to this, Cartesi is moving forward with its decentralization efforts and piloting a guild program to identify and recognize contributions from community members. This aims not only to be a vector for future decentralization activities, but also to encourage developers and community members alike to continue engaging with and growing the Cartesi ecosystem.
Keep an eye out in the months to come for a restructuring of the Cartesi Discord channel, with more dynamic public discussion amongst contributors regarding research and development of Cartesi’s core technology.
Rebranding
Over the past year, there’s been a growing organic consensus amongst Cartesi’s core contributors, builders, and community members that there’s a need to evolve the brand to more closely capture the Cartesi community’s values and vision for the future.
With that, we’re excited to announce the newest contributor to the Cartesi ecosystem, Noir — a dedicated Web3 brand venture studio focused on the intersection of community and technology. Noir’s contributions will be focused on creating a fresh brand identity for Cartesi’s technology and ecosystem. This refreshed identity will embody the spirit of openness, decentralization, and transformative potential, better representing the current values of Cartesi’s ecosystem.
With this rebrand, Noir aims to help Cartesi mirror the project’s move toward further decentralization, and to empower and attract meaningful contributions from future developers, especially given the new wave of interest surrounding app-specific rollups.
With prominent Web3 projects like Moonpay, Rarestone, and Biconomy in Noir’s portfolio, we’re excited to see Noir help establish Cartesi as a new stage for vast experiments, helping our developer community bring impossible ideas to life.
The Road to Mainnet for Cartesi DApps
The question “When mainnet?” frequently arises in Cartesi’s community channels, causing confusion for many community members and contributors alike.
Part of this confusion comes from the fact Cartesi Rollups is an application-specific execution environment that can be deployed as layer 2 or layer 3; it’s not a layer 1 blockchain or DApp, which means that the traditional concept of a “mainnet launch” for Cartesi differs from many other blockchain projects. What will actually go to mainnet are DApps built using Cartesi.
Cartesi Rollups will be mainnet-ready with the launch of the first Cartesi-powered DApp on mainnet: Honeypot!
Honeypot DApp on Mainnet
Cartesi core contributors are fine-tuning Cartesi Rollups and enhancing the security and usability of the Cartesi Rollups infrastructure. Now, it’s time for yet another test: securing real assets in a permissionless and decentralized environment!
To achieve this, Cartesi grantees are preparing the launch of the Honeypot DApp on Ethereum mainnet, designed to engage Cartesi’s community of developers in an exciting hacking challenge. The Honeypot DApp, developed and deployed with Cartesi’s tech, will hold real assets with a dual objective: setting a financial benchmark for secure asset management and providing a gamified battlefield for the community to help audit and test Cartesi’s cutting-edge technology.
Unlike traditional bug bounties or capture-the-flag events, there will be no requirement to submit a hacking recipe, and there are no hidden elements to discover. Crack the Honeypot, and the spoils are yours — no strings attached!
The Honeypot DApp’s mainnet launch will mark the beginning of a new era for the Cartesi project. As the Honeypot is tested and fortified, users and devs will have increased confidence in the security of Cartesi’s tech to launch and use new DApps that hold real assets.
Ecosystem and Adoption
Ecosystem Incentives Program
With the launch of the Honeypot DApp and mainnet-ready announcement for Cartesi Rollups, the Cartesi Foundation plans to create a new Ecosystem Incentives Program that will be run by the community and funded with CTSI. The Ecosystem Incentives Program will be available for Cartesi DApps that are deployed on mainnet. Through this program, a pool of CTSI will be available to qualifying DApps to be used as an incentive mechanism to acquire users and adoption.
Experimental DApps
To showcase experimental DApps and make it easier for the community to share or explore new and developing projects within the Cartesi ecosystem, you can look forward to a website that features the groundbreaking new ways that Cartesi Rollups open the design space for decentralized applications.
Hackathons
Following strong hackathon participation in 2022, Cartesi will continue to take part in ETH Global hackathons in 2023, with a planned presence sponsoring ETH Lisbon, ETH Paris, ETH New York, ETH Istanbul and ETHGlobal Online. With more than $50,000 in prizes up for grabs at ETH Global hackathons and beyond, we look forward to seeing the next wave of developers come and hack on Cartesi tech.
Technical Workshops
To encourage technical experimentation and onboard new builders, Cartesi will continue to host technical workshops for developer communities around the world. Building on successful workshops with Think&Dev, Web3Ladies, NITW (National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India), Austin Python, Red Hat Blockchain Community of Practice, EasyA, Inteli, and more! We look forward to seeing more organizations and universities collaborate with the Cartesi community to onboard the next wave of Web3 builders to Cartesi technology.
Conclusion
With Cartesi Rollups fast-approaching a mainnet-ready stage, there’s never been a more exciting time for the Cartesi ecosystem. We look forward to following along as our growing community of contributors pushes the project to new heights in the months ahead!
About Cartesi
Cartesi is an application-specific rollup execution layer with a Linux runtime. Cartesi Rollups can be deployed as a layer 2 (on top of Ethereum), as a layer 3 (on top of Optimism, Arbitrum, zkEVM chains, etc.), or as sovereign rollups. It opens up the design space for more expressive and computationally intensive blockchain applications.
- DApps are deployed on their own customizable application-specific rollup chains;
- DApps don’t compete with each other in Cartesi’s ecosystem for scarce blockspace;
- Cartesi provides Ethereum or L2’s with orders of magnitude more computational capacity;
- Developers can code decentralized logic with their favorite libraries, compilers and other time-tested open source components;
- DApps preserve the strong security guarantees and censorship resistance of the underlying blockchain;
- Cartesi Rollups opens up the design space for more expressive and computationally intensive blockchain applications;
- Cartesi Rollups can be deployed as a layer 2 (on top of Ethereum), as a layer 3 (on top of Optimism, Arbitrum, zkEVM chains, etc.), or as sovereign rollups;
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