Cartesi’s 2021 Year in Review
And what an incredible year of growth and expansion it was!
As of 2022 Descartes has now been renamed as Cartesi Compute.
December 31st, 2021 — Happy New Year to our community members from every corner of the globe!
It’s been a phenomenal year for Cartesi, one that we’re happy to have shared with you, our wonderful community. From starting with 16 members at the beginning of 2021 to ending the year with a hugely talented team of 45, we’re looking forward to welcoming even more new faces to Cartesi in 2022. And it’s not just the Cartesi team that grew! Our communities across Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Reddit, alongside other social platforms have flourished this year and we’ve loved every minute of interaction, whether that’s answering your questions in our channels or through AMAs we’ve joined and hosted.
So here’s to our community! In the midst of a progressing pandemic, we showed resilience together. Despite (semi) lockdowns and social distancing we still have the ability to see the best in each other. We see how community members keep each other strong, how we lift each other up with random acts of kindness. Thank you Cartesi Ambassadors, for playing an important role in this!
If you’re new to Cartesi, or have been with us since the beginning of our journey, let’s recap the milestones we’ve achieved together in 2021! See something that interests you? Click through to dive deeper:
January 2021
Cartesi’s New Chapter — Scalable Smart Contracts built with Mainstream Software
January saw our long-awaited Cartesi Rollups article, where we dove deep into how our optimistic rollups solution will enable smart contracts to scale and be coded with mainstream software stacks. This month we also reached several milestones in relation to CTSI Reserve Mining and Staking. In less than a month after launch, we quickly grew to over $1,000,000 US in CTSI, ending January with $2,000,000 in CTSI staked — an amazing amount of participation from our community! To help increase staking accessibility and convenience for our community, we also onboarded two custodial staking partners: MyCointainer and Coinone.
February 2021
Collaborations with Elrond, Avalanche, and Cartesi DApps in IoT and NFT’s Now on the Cartesi Compute SDK
Releasing our Roadmap for 2021, February saw even more staking achievements, a growing number of organic nodes, and a rush of new community members. In addition to this, as part of our ongoing initiatives to integrate with the most important blockchains and support the development of smart contracts using Linux and mainstream software components, we announced integrations and partnerships with Avalanche and Elrond. We also entered the last phase of our DApp Incubation Program with the 3 teams (Creol, SimThunder, and Carti) building on our live product, the Cartesi Compute SDK.
March 2021
Integrations and Partnerships with Injective, Travala, IOTA, and a Brand New DApp Showcase under development with Polygon
We announced integrations and partnerships with Injective, Travala, IOTA, as well as our exciting tech showcase that we are developing with Polygon — Texas HODL’em Poker! We also released our last pending milestones for Q1: Noether’s PoS v1.1, and Cartesi Compute v1.1.
Alongside these huge announcements, we also expanded our presence significantly in March, having CTSI registered on Messari, an integration for wrapped CTSI on Binance Smart Chain, running a new series of youtube videos, AMA’s, blog articles, and reaching over 50M CTSI staked via Noether’s PoS System.
April 2021
Adoption Inbound: Cartesi Labs $1M US Ecosystem Fund, Binance Pay, and more!
In April, we launched Cartesi Labs, a $1,000,000 US ecosystem fund that offers a suite of programs to drive the adoption of Cartesi’s technology and ecosystem. In addition to this, we were excited to announce a partnership with IMPA, launching a local Cartesi Lab at one of the world’s most renowned mathematics institutes.
Alongside more integrations and new listings for CTSI on Polygon, pairs on Quickswap, and CTSI integration with Binance Pay, we also presented a new tech feature on how we’ll enable smart cities, take a look:
May 2021
Expansion and Global Access: Coinbase, Huobi, Crypto.com, and more!
One of our most exciting announcements in May was CTSI listing on Coinbase and Coinbase Pro with fiat pairs, in addition to Coinbase Custody! We were beyond excited to debut in the United States and expand access to CTSI as more important milestones approach. In addition to this listing, CTSI was also listed on premier exchanges such as Huobi, Crypto.com’s App and Exchange, Binance’s Liquid Swap, and an Indian Rupee pair on WazirX alongside other regional exchanges! We’re excited to be able to welcome even more new faces and grow our CTSI community around the world.
In addition, we announced new partnerships for Cartesi and Cartesi Labs. First, Cartesi Labs partnered with SOSV’s dlab, a leading VC firm, to support Cartesi Labs’ program participants and accelerate their growth. We also partnered with Gather Network to expand CTSI utility.
Want to see how Cartesi can help in new industries, such as gaming? Check out the first article in our mini-series on decentralized gaming:
June 2021
Cartesi Governance, More Listings, and Q2 Milestones Rolling Out!
June saw the launch of Noether’s PoS staking delegation on Testnet as well as our plans for the first fully decentralized poker tech showcase and its technical article. Alongside this, we also announced the rollout plan for Cartesi Rollups! Continuing expansion of support and integrations for CTSI, we listed on Poloniex, Bithumb, and integrated CTSI as a payment solution on NOWPayments, allowing merchants to accept CTSI.
In addition to this, we were also beyond excited to continually involve our community and launch Cartesi Governance: Cartesi Improvement Proposals. This marked the beginning of governance processes for the Cartesi ecosystem that will be progressively more decentralized.
July 2021
Rollups Rollout, Texas HODL’em, Chess Tech Showcase and CTSI Revolut Listing!
July opened with the launch of our Texas HODL’em landing page and a deep dive into how Cartesi is changing turn-based games. We showed how the smart contracts for our Texas HODL’em MVP can also be applied to online chess, allowing developers to make an existing game fully decentralized without touching a single line of solidity.
We also delivered on our Rollups rollout plan, releasing two tools to the community; State Fold and Transaction Manager, as well as explaining how we’re enabling these smart contracts to be coded with mainstream software in our Rollups On-chain piece.
Alongside these exciting ecosystems rollouts, we also saw over 90,000,000 CTSI staked on Noether’s current PoS system, CTSI listed on mainstream financial super app Revolut, and CEO Erick de Moura chatting exclusively with BitBoy on Cartesi’s goals and Q2 milestones. Check out the video:
August 2021
Team Expansion, Blockchain Gaming, CTSI Kraken Listing & More!
August was a brilliant month of expansion for Cartesi, starting with welcoming nine new members to our team, a new listing on Kraken, and further expanding our relationship with the BGA through sponsorship. Following this, we gathered an amazing panel of speakers to unpack how blockchain is disrupting the gaming industry and what’s next in line for blockchain games. A range of perspectives (a mainstream gamer, a game developer, an investor, and two infrastructure providers), made for a truly insightful and inclusive discussion. If you missed our gaming panel, make sure to watch the replay.
For ecosystem updates, August saw the release of the final code for our Rollups series, Cartesi Node and for our poker showcase, a recorded behind-the-scenes session with our tech team as well as an AMA with Polygon on what our turn-based game smart contracts mean for the gaming industry.
September 2021
Delegated Staking Beta Mainnet Countdown, CTSI KuCoin Listing, Expansions & More!
With a mission to bring the next million developers to blockchain, we don’t want to stop at developers. In September, we amped up our social media strategy and created more content to help people learn about blockchain. We’re celebrating milestones and events in blockchain history, breaking down blockchain use cases such as in gaming, and have more in the works. Make sure to follow us on our social channels, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn to keep up to date.
Gearing up to our Delegated Staking Mainnet launch, we announced 3 organizations supporting us on our journey through Mainnet Beta to the full Mainnet release: Everstake, HashQuark, and Blockscope. In more expansion news, September also saw CTSI listed on KuCoin, decentralized protocol for creating cross-chain wrappers, Knit Finance, integrating Cartesi (CTSI) into its platform, and Cartesi joining the largest enterprise Ethereum ecosystem: Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
October 2021
Celebrating our community, Mainnet launch & continued expansion!
October welcomed an amazing start with the Mainnet Beta release of Nother’s Delegated Staking System, a two-week soft launch that saw the smooth release of the full version on Mainnet. We’re overjoyed to see the support of our community and we quickly reached yet another staking milestone with 118.89M CTSI staked.
To celebrate the diversity of the community we’ve built, in October we shined the spotlight on our Ambassadors to CTSI holders asking them what it means to be part of our growing community across the globe. Introducing even more people to Cartesi, we also successfully launched our Learn and Earn program with Coinbase Earn! And we didn’t stop there! October was a great month for AMAs and features, check out Head of Business Expansion Vinicius in Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Member Spotlight, and CEO Erick de Moura’s and COO Colin Steil’s AMA with Binance talking about our recent Mainnet launch and the future of Cartesi. If you missed out, catch up with our recap.
November 2021
Growing our network, team, and expanding CTSI access.
In November, our team, Max, Bruno, Nathalie, Vinicius, and Erick, traveled to Portugal for 2021’s Websummit, booking flights and hotels with CTSI, serendipitously encountered CTSI holders, and had a blast connecting with tens of companies and startups interested in working with Cartesi technology. From IoT, sustainability, and gaming, take a look at our WebSummit recap post for more details.
What’s more, we welcomed another staking institution, RockX, to Noether’s Delegated Staking and continued on our goal to expand access to the CTSI community, listing on Binance.US and integrating with iMe, allowing over 2.5 million iMe users to easily send to, or receive CTSI from, their Telegram contacts.
December 2021
A spectacular end to the year, announcing a new partnership with IoTeX, Texas HODL’em Poker Showcase and Cartesi Rollups alpha release!
We were super excited to start the month announcing our partnership with IoTeX, hosting a joint-ideathon for Dutch Blockchain Week, where we asked participants to come up with an If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) use case that utilizes the power of Cartesi x IoTeX technology. Take a look at the kick-off session here (it’s designed to be accessible to all!), and the Top 5 ideas selected by our jury.
Launching a new series, we interviewed members of our global Cartesi community on why they’re holding CTSI. It’s the perfect introduction if you’re just getting started in the crypto space, or if you’d like to introduce a friend to Cartesi! Check out our interviews with Joe, a Dutch Chartered Accountant, and Pool Managers, Bodgan and Emanuel of Omnistake about why they chose Cartesi.
To celebrate winter festivities, spread the holiday spirit, and help our community get to know the global team behind Cartesi, we launched our Christmas Advent Calendar with Travala.com sharing travel experiences, recommendations, and travel prizes to count down the days until Christmas. We also had fun joining Binance for their #SantaGiftsAPlenty campaign, to help bring more people to our CTSI community and allow anyone who gifted CTSI for Christmas to receive rewards back in return.
To round off the year, our Head of Marketing Nathalie Brähler hosted a special Texas HODL’em Poker Showcase to demonstrate updates we’ve made to our MVP live in action and deliver long-awaited news for 150 testers to test ride the fully decentralized heads-up poker MVP as from January! The Poker Showcase was closed by Cartesi CEO Erick who gave a fantastic speech recapping 2021 as well as providing a sneak preview of what’s to come in 2022, catch up with the replay of the show here:
Let’s top 2021 with the best news: Cartesi DApps are here! We launched Cartesi Rollups’ alpha release and are excited to be providing developers with a full operating system on blockchain, providing full flexibility to developers in choosing their development environment.
Ready to develop your DApp in Linux using your favorite IDE, programming stack and tools? We can’t wait to see all the DApps built on Cartesi tech in 2022, if you want to get started, read our overview below, check out our repo, and let’s code!
If you want to learn how to code with blockchain but are not sure where to start, don’t worry! We’re thrilled to be working with Tech with Tim to introduce even more people to blockchain and accompany the next generation of developers on their first steps to creating amazing and exciting decentralized applications.
Check out Tim’s first video in this series and learn how to get set up on Ethereum and start learning how to write your very first smart contract:
We’re looking forward to what 2022 holds for us and can’t wait to share what’s coming up next with you, our community. Thank you for all your support and for being part of our journey. Let’s make 2022 our year!
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If you’re interested in developing with Cartesi, working with the team, or hanging out in our community, don’t forget to join us on Discord and follow along.
As always, if you have an idea, want to help with research, or have an existing project, make sure to apply to our $1,000,000 US Ecosystem Fund: the Cartesi Labs program!
Want to stay up to date? Make sure to join our announcements channel on Telegram or follow our Twitter.
About Cartesi: Home to what’s next
Cartesi is the first OS on the blockchain, and their Layer-2 solution integrates Linux and standard programming environments to blockchain. This allows developers to code scalable smart contracts with rich software tools, libraries, and services they are used to.
Cartesi bridges the gap between mainstream software and blockchain, welcoming millions of new startups and their developers to blockchain by bringing Linux to blockchain applications. Cartesi combines a groundbreaking virtual machine, optimistic rollups, and side-chains to revolutionize the way developers create blockchain applications.
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