Cartesi x Binance AMA Recap
Catch up on topics covered by CEO, Erick & COO, Colin in our latest AMA with Binance
As of 2022 Descartes has now been renamed as Cartesi Compute.
21/10/2021 — Following Noether’s highly anticipated Staking Delegation Mainnet launch, we recently joined Binance for an AMA on Telegram! CEO, Erick de Moura and COO, Colin Steil chatted about how CTSI holders are helping secure and decentralize Noether’s PoS network with delegated staking, new Cartesi Rollup developments, updates on DApps, and the future of Cartesi. Catch up on the details below:
Note: some of the text may have been edited for clarity and grammar.
Binance Admin: Hi everyone and welcome to a special AMA with the Cartesi team! It is my pleasure to introduce to you Erick de Moura, who is Cartesi’s CEO, and Colin Steil, Cartesi’s COO!
Hi Erick and Colin, thank you for joining us today, would you please introduce yourself to the chat and share a quick overview of Cartesi?
Erick: I’m Erick de Moura, Founder and CEO at Cartesi. I am an entrepreneur and technical leader, having dedicated more than 20 years to the software industry. Throughout this time, I’ve gathered solid understanding and experience in software design and development processes, bringing comprehensive solutions to tech companies in different verticals such as Fintech, Healthtech, E-commerce, and Infrastructure.
As Cartesi’s CEO, I work passionately with a team of excellent academics and engineers, helping to turn decentralization mainstream.
Colin: Hey all, I’m Colin, Co-Founder & COO at Cartesi. I come from a background of venture capital, corporate banking, and founding previous start-ups. I have expertise in execution and years of experience in community building and business operations across the globe. I have a huge passion to make blockchain a reality and that’s one of the reasons I am so committed to our vision at Cartesi.
As COO of Cartesi, I work across many different dimensions in the business, from company and foundation operations, financials, and helping to oversee BD and marketing execution. It’s a pleasure to be here and take part in the AMA!
Colin [continued]:
I can also introduce a little bit about Cartesi. Cartesi is a multi-chain layer-2 infrastructure that allows any software developer to create smart contracts with mainstream software tools and languages they are used to while achieving massive scalability and low costs. Cartesi combines a groundbreaking virtual machine, optimistic rollups and side-chains to revolutionize the way developers create blockchain applications.
Cartesi exists to provide the infrastructure for decentralized applications that are easier for developers to build and with a user experience comparable to Internet applications. Cartesi brings Linux to blockchain applications aiming to bridge the gap between mainstream software, libraries and services and blockchain.
Binance Admin: Thank you Colin and Erick for that quick introduction! Let’s jump right into the first segment of today’s AMA session. Erick, here’s our first question for you.
Q1: Can you expand more on Cartesi’s vision and goals, and also give us a background on the team nowadays?
Erick: The world of apps that we love on our phones and desktop has been built on top of real operating systems, like Linux. It is the ground of our entire digital life. Unfortunately, when it comes to blockchains, no operating system is available. Cartesi is the first operating system for blockchain. It gives developers the software environment they are already familiar with and that they can use to build powerful blockchain applications.
By solving the scalability problem with rollups and providing a real Linux OS for smart contracts, Cartesi brings a necessary piece that will allow developers to feel at home and limitless in expression. We aim at bridging the currently huge gap between the development of centralized and decentralized applications.
We have a rapidly growing global team of exceedingly skilled professionals that work with passion, brilliance and extreme care. We have more than 40 professionals in our core team and we are hiring the best talents.
Binance Admin: Thank you for sharing the amazing vision of Cartesi! Our next question is for Colin.
Q2. Cartesi has recently announced delegation for Noether’s PoS system on mainnet, can you explain what this is?
Colin: Definitely, we are extremely excited about the launch of the delegation feature on Noether’s Proof of Stake system. To give a brief introduction to Noether, it’s one of the products in our scalability stack, in addition to Cartesi Rollups and Cartesi Compute. Noether will provide a high-performance data availability layer for DApps. Noether’s PoS system has been running smoothly with fantastic organic growth since the start of the year, and we’ve just launched the delegation feature!
Now, any individual or organization can create and manage staking pools without any limit or cap imposed in a safe and trusted environment that has been thoroughly tested and audited. The community or any holder of CTSI can easily delegate their CTSI to an existing pool through the Cartesi Explorer: https://explorer.cartesi.io.
We worked hard to ensure that our community members holding CTSI would be exposed to a minimum amount of risk throughout three test phases, including the last beta phase on Mainnet. By staking CTSI, holders are helping to secure and decentralize the network. We’re also pleased to announce that Binance recently launched support for CTSI staking, so it’s even easier for those of you who have CTSI on Binance to stake with no gas fees! For more info check our announcement: https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements/454
Binance Admin: Thanks for sharing! I bet we have lots of audience members watching and supporting Cartesi’s every step! We’re very happy to have opened up staking support for CTSI on Binance.
Q3. Can you explain more about Cartesi Rollups and the status?
Erick: Cartesi Rollups is a variant of optimistic rollups with interactive dispute resolution. To understand what it means you can read this article. The important thing to understand is that it gives smart contracts massive computational scalability and transaction fee reduction.
But Cartesi Rollups is very unique compared with all other rollups implementations in the sense that it allows developers for the first time to create smart contracts using Linux and all-powerful software components that evolved on top of it for more than 30 years. It means that the experience of developing smart contracts is not constrained to languages like Solidity and restrictions of VM’s like the EVM. Cartesi Rollups gives a real, standard and familiar computing environment so developers can create smart contracts and DApps in a way that is very similar to coding web applications — a lingua-franca for most developers of the world.
Binance Admin: That’s awesome! Moving on to question 4.
Q4. With your full suite of scalability solutions already being implemented and released, what are current DApps on Cartesi and which industries will you focus on?
Erick: We actually have several teams and internal DApps that have already built on early versions of Cartesi Compute. Cartesi Compute in its first version, before being ported to rollups as Erick explained above, acts as a computational oracle that enables mainstream software and computational scalability. The following DApps used various versions of it:
- Creepts: https://creepts.cartesi.io — A fully decentralized tower defense tournament game that was built in-house — launched when CTSI went on Binance Launchpad.
- Creol: https://www.creol.io/ — An IoT project using Cartesi to verify carbon credits.
- SimThunder / GG DApp: https://ggdapp.com/ — A gaming project using Cartesi to create a secure, private file transfer marketplace for NFT’s.
- Carti: https://cartipkgr.urpkgr.com/ — A package manager for Cartesi machines.
- Texas HODL’em: https://poker.cartesi.io — A fully decentralized poker game that uses mainstream algorithms. Watch for news on the MVP testing soon!
We believe that Cartesi’s technology will enable a multitude of new DApps that were not possible before. In particular, we’d like to focus on showcasing our technology on games as we believe this will drive adoption of blockchain in the months/years to come and Cartesi is a great showcase for the next generation of blockchain games.
In addition, we also have an ecosystem fund called Cartesi Labs (www.cartesi.io/labs)! Cartesi Labs offers grants for applications for anyone exploring building DApps as well. There are also grants for developing tools and researching. We are strongly focused on mainstream developers and users. The Cartesi team is working hard and truly committed to bridging the gap between these two worlds. We will help bring millions of mainstream individuals to the amazing decentralized world that is blockchain.
Binance Admin: On to the last question for this segment!
Q5. With so many scalability solutions and different blockchains available, how does Cartesi plans to stay ahead of the competition?
Colin: It is true that Cartesi is developing layer-2 infrastructure that really solves scalability and high fee problems for blockchains, and in this sense, it is not the only one. Although Cartesi will hardly be surpassed in terms of computational scalability, it is not competing in this field. Cartesi uses a highly scalable layer-2 infrastructure in order to give developers a real Linux operating system for blockchains, for the first time ever. That makes Cartesi uniquely positioned to be the home of the next mainstream software developers to adopt blockchain technology. In fact, these are still the early days, and only 0.1% of developers have tried smart contracts.
Besides, Cartesi is flexible to run on top of the most important blockchains, with ongoing integrations or collaborations with blockchains projects like Avalanche, Elrond, IOTA. And also collaboration with other layer-2 solutions, such as Polygon. Cartesi stands as an infrastructure that will have a flourishing ecosystem while making these other networks more powerful.
Binance Admin: Thank you Erick and Colin for sharing your thoughts and answers with all of us. It’s time for the quiz segment, where you have the chance to earn some CTSI!
If you’re catching up via our recap — don’t worry! You may still have the chance to earn some free CTSI via our new program with Coinbase Earn.* Check out the details here.
*Coinbase Earn is only available in selected regions. Check if you’re eligible to participate via their FAQ.
Let’s move onto the open question from our community segment!
Q1. Why would one use CTSI since other L1 such as AVAX, BSC are already pretty fast and cheap? Is the biggest advantage the use of the software language?
Erick: Great question! No matter how fast a blockchain is, at some point, transactions hit a limit. The kind of computation required by the apps you love on your phone or desktop requires much more processing than any blockchain can provide. That is why layer-2 solutions for scalability exist. And that is why the Ethereum Foundation has been embracing Rollups so strongly. It would be good enough if Cartesi were developing a solution for scaling.
But that is not the only thing we do. We give developers, for the first time, the environment and tools they use to build mobile and web apps. It is not even a matter of supporting more languages like C++ or Rust (some blockchains do it). It is a matter of giving tools and components that can actually allow a Cambrian explosion of innovation on blockchains.
Q2. If the node fails due to node downtime, offline or insufficient ETH funds, can I still generate blocks and get rewards?
Colin: Good question and I would love to clarify this for everyone interested in participating in staking CTSI, either by running their own node or through delegating to a pool.
Whether you are running your own node/pool, or are delegating to a pool, you will always rely on the node owner running the node successfully. If it is offline or doesn’t have enough ETH in the wallet to produce blocks, you will miss out on the opportunity to produce that block and receive the reward.
For delegating to pools, however, it’s important to note that your tokens are never at risk, it is fully decentralized and you always maintain ownership over them. You can always switch pools if the pool manager is not running the node correctly.
If you are interested in delegating to a pool, make sure to check out https://explorer.cartesi.io
Q3. Hi Colin and Erick! I had so much fun playing the Cartesi Creepts tournament back in the day. Do you have any plans of rolling out an application/more tournaments like this in the future?
Erick: Hey Rob, we also had a lot of fun building, deploying, and running Creept’s tournament on Binance Launchpad last year.
Make no mistake that was only a small taste of something big that we are building. That same enthusiasm that we had with Creepts is what moves us forward every day. We are working to make Cartesi ready for the next generation of blockchain applications, and clearly, blockchain games will be the first big beneficiaries.
Texas HODL’em is another game that we are building and we have very good ideas for it.
But even more important than that is the fact that we are starting to work closely with other gaming companies that are willing to build titles with Cartesi. Stay tuned and close to us! Thanks for your support!
Q4. Tell us the reason Cartesi chose Linux to develop your project. Also, is it possible to develop DApps with other operating systems?!!!
Colin: We chose Linux as it is one of the most used operating systems across the world. For example, in 2021, 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run on Linux, 96.3% of the world’s top 1 million servers run on Linux, 90% of all cloud infrastructure operates on Linux and practically all the best cloud hosts use it, and 85% of all smartphones are based on Linux. This is just a taste of Linux’s impact as well — not to mention it’s completely open-source which fits well with decentralization and blockchain.
However, the most important comparison shouldn’t be done between different operating systems. The relevant comparison to be done is between what you can program on blockchain now and what you will be able to do with Cartesi with a real OS (like Linux, BSD, Windows, etc.). Right now, if you are programming with Solidity for Ethereum, even converting a number to String is hard. This is very basic in programming.
Other very basic things like compressing/decompressing files or running MySQL are impossible on blockchain. With Cartesi (running Linux) you can do these things and way more.
If you really wanted to run Windows on a Cartesi Machine, you actually could. Cartesi can boot any OS that can be compiled for a RISC-V architecture. However, at this point, we don’t have a good reason to support other OS’s out of the box.
Q5. Noether is Cartesi’s sidechain designed for temporary data availability. How does Noether enable DApps to increase performance? What tools does Cartesi provide for DApps to improve their large file storage at reduced rates?
Erick: So, here is the thing. If you look at Cartesi as a big decentralized computer, it must scale very well in processing/computation and data/storage. That’s the only way that we will be able to make blockchain tech fly high, become mainstream, and perform in a similar way to the conventional mobile/web/desktop apps.
When we think about such a “decentralized computer”, Cartesi Rollups works as the CPU, the microprocessor (and the operating system!). So it can run complex and heavy stuff that cannot be run on any blockchain (even the fastest ones).
However, having a scalable “CPU” may not be enough for several applications that need more storage. Remember that storage on blockchains is extremely expensive.
That’s where Noether (Cartesi’s side chain) comes in handy. With Noether, applications send large files that would be impossible to be stored on-chain to a side-chain that guarantees data availability and all security guarantees that they require.
If Cartesi Rollups works as the CPU, Noether works as the Hard Drive of such a decentralized computer.
Q6. The roadmap tells us what you have planned until 2021, with this being crypto that’s a very short roadmap! What are the plans for the future, and do you hope to do
Colin: As we work in an industry that is changing by the day, it’s extremely hard to plan out a roadmap so far down the road, this is why we’ve limited the time frame on the roadmaps we release.
Rest assured, however, we are constantly looking to the future — Cartesi is not just a project that is looking to fulfill its roadmap and that’s it. We are constantly innovating and looking to solve the biggest problems in the blockchain space. We even have a few innovations up our sleeves that we haven’t published anywhere yet.
That being said, watch for an updated roadmap article coming in the next months.
Q7. Cartesi has 9 national ambassadors + 1 global ambassador (from the website), but no ambassador from the continental United States, despite the partnership with IMPA (Brazil) can you explain this?
Colin: We are working on revamping our ambassador program entirely. We’d love to focus more on technical evangelists as well, as our technology further comes to Mainnet and as we expand Cartesi Labs.
We actually do have an ambassador from the US who manages our Reddit, in addition to this we have an ambassador that covers us globally!
Q8. What are the biggest challenges for Cartesi to for building a secure and successful Linux Infrastructure? Where did the name Cartesi come from? Is there any Inspiration?
Erick: At the core of our tech, we have the Cartesi Machine, which is Cartesi’s VM. It has been built to be flawlessly reproducible and self-contained. For that, we designed and implemented an emulator of RISC-V’s hardware architecture, that supports Linux. Aside from the emulator itself, one of the most beautiful parts that are one of the pillars of Cartesi’s security, is an implementation of RISC-V instructions in Solidity, which runs on EVM-compatible chains.
We can say it is the first (and possibly the only) emulator of a real microprocessor architecture that runs on smart contracts. If you read our tech paper you can understand in detail how that stands at the heart of Cartesi’s security. That is not a simple development task, it requires thorough automated testing and auditing.
At this moment, the low-level/core dev team is starting to work on a whole new approach that simplifies extremely the on-chain instruction set implementation. That will be instrumental for much faster and secure integrations with any other blockchain.
The name Cartesi comes from the mathematician and philosopher Rene Cartesi Compute, who among other things talked about the mind-body problem. The duality of the human body and soul. We found that to be an interesting metaphor for our second layer approach! 😉
Q9. What are the eligibility requirements for joining Cartesi organization as a developer?
Erick: Cartesi’s developers are very carefully chosen but we have people from all over the world and it is very important for us to be as inclusive and diverse as possible.
Developers need to prove great academic background (and/or exceptional experience in the software industry). They must be very good at working with a remote team and have great self-management and communication skills. Finally, it is part of our culture to have a very friendly and supportive environment, so that is also considered.
Q10. Will Cartesi keep its Twitter location as “Linux”? It was Rollups last month?
Colin: We are actually a team of over 40 professionals from all around the world and fully remote, so we don’t have one specific location.
The current Twitter location is for fun, representing what we care about and work on, and we may keep it as is for now 😊.
Q11. I realized that Polygon appears on your website, is this the only chain that you support? Do you have plans to integrate NFTs?
Erick: Cartesi is a multi-chain infrastructure. We have collaboration with different blockchain/protocol teams like Polygon, Avalanche, Elrond, Injective, and IOTA. Cartesi Rollups will be launched initially on Polygon, followed by Ethereum and the other EVM-supporting chains. Finally, the most relevant non-EVM chains will be supported too.
And, of course, Cartesi Rollups will also support NFT’s!
For the core tech, please check the answer above on Cartesi Rollups and Noether. 👍
Q12. Why Cartesi?
Erick: You can check this short video😊:
Q13. In terms of regulation, are you fully compliant so that it will ensure peace of mind among investors? Do you think your team is ready to face the challenge of government regulation to achieve that goal?
Colin: Good question, we have an ever-changing landscape and always want to be ahead of the game to ensure we are fully compliant.
Cartesi already works with several law firms in the US, Singapore, and other countries.
In addition, we are now actually hiring an in-house blockchain lawyer who will be our general counsel. As a team, we are very concerned with this and believe it is important to stay ready and to adapt to any kind of new regulations and are a step ahead of what is happening to ensure we are not affected by changes.
We are a serious team and are committed to making our vision a reality!
Q14. How does this auction system work and what benefits does it bring to staking?
Colin: I believe you are referring to the CTSI Macroeconomy, which we will start developing in 2022 and will come into effect after the Mine Reserve is depleted.
Essentially, Cartesi is developing a macroeconomy staking system that will expand on the recently released one that overcomes major issues of Proof of Stake systems.
The CTSI Macroeconomy staking auctions will enable the following:
- No assumptions about users’ risk preferences
- Users’ rewards are always known instead of varying with the total funds staked in the network
- The system allows stakers to express and apply different risk preferences
- The system is balanced to minimize inflation while maintaining the security of the network
You can read more about this article here:
Q15. CTSI is also used in Cartesi Compute Rollups. So, can you explain this in a little more detail? What are the benefits of this? Thanks.
Erick: That is a very important point that will be covered in more depth in upcoming articles in Q4.
Aside from being used as crypto-fuel for Noether, CTSI will be used to pay validators for the off-chain computation they perform and for their execution of “rollups outputs” back to layer-1. It will be an important incentive structure for node runners.
To understand in-depth how Cartesi Rollups and outputs work, please check this beautifully written article by our blockchain team lead, Felipe Argento:
Binance Admin: Thank you everyone for their questions! It has been great to have both of you with us today, Erick and Colin, to talk more about Cartesi’s business. Here are some important links for our community to follow the project:
- Website: https://cartesi.io/
- Telegram: https://t.me/CartesiProject & https://t.me/CartesiAnnouncements
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject
- Reddit: reddit.com/r/cartesi/
- Discord (Dev community): https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cartesiproject
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cartesiproject/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cartesiproject/
Colin: It was a pleasure everyone. Thanks for the AMA. See you in one of our communities and channels!
Erick: Thanks! You guys can also check my Twitter account and interact directly with me over there: https://twitter.com/erickdemoura
About Cartesi
Cartesi is a multi-chain layer-2 infrastructure that allows any software developer to create smart contracts with mainstream software tools and languages they are used to while achieving massive scalability and low costs. Cartesi combines a groundbreaking virtual machine, optimistic rollups and side-chains to revolutionize the way developers create blockchain applications.
Follow Cartesi across official channels:
Telegram Announcements | Telegram | Discord (Development Community)| Reddit | Twitter | Facebook| Instagram | Youtube | Github | Website
