February 2023 Development Recap for Cartesi.

See the latest updates on the Cartesi Machine, Cartesi Rollups, and Noether.

Published in

Cartesi

5 min readMar 21, 2023

Looking for the latest developments on Cartesi tech? You’re in the right place! As outlined in our roadmap article, we’re moving towards more regular and frequent updates to keep our community in the loop on the progress we’re making to get Cartesi technology to the production level — to where a beautiful and diverse DApp ecosystem can flourish and grow.

Not too familiar with the components of Cartesi technology? Make sure you take a read through these introductory articles to get you up to speed before you dive in:

For a quick overview on February’s developments, check out the roadmap diagram below to see what’s new for the Cartesi Machine, Cartesi Rollups, and Noether.

The Cartesi Machine

The Cartesi Machine is Cartesi’s deterministic virtual machine that emulates a RISC-V architecture and can run a full-fledged Linux OS. It is a groundbreaking technology that offers a runtime for decentralized applications built with mainstream software.

The Microarchitecture

A first Solidity microarchitecture interpreter implementation is already under review!
The C++ microarchitecture interpreter automated tests were updated to increase coverage.
The mechanism for halting the microarchitecture interpreter was improved.

Self-Hosted Distributions

The next Rollups examples’ release will bring the new rootfs build system which increases the developer’s experience, specially for those DApps that require dependencies installation.
This was possible due to our new Cartesi Machine Emulator SDK release (0.14.0) which brings compressed instructions and floating point support.
We are very excited to achieve this roadmap goal and we’re sure that you will also celebrate that when trying it out.

Infrastructure for Rollups

Here comes a list of improvements in our Machine emulator and its components to support Cartesi Rollups progress:

Compressed instructions were released as part of our new Cartesi Machine Emulator SDK release (0.14.0).

Other improvements

Prototype for hypervisor support: KVM is already booting Linux and executing a classic “Hello world!” test program.
Migration of some components from gRPC to JSON-RPC is still in progress.

Cartesi Rollups

Cartesi Rollups is Cartesi’s optimistic rollup layer-2 system relying on the Cartesi Machine to allow developers to create scalable decentralized applications with mainstream software components. It consists of on-chain and off-chain components that allow the blockchain to provide data availability, order input data, bridge tokens between layer-1 and layer-2, and serve as a referee in case of disputes.

Road to Mainnet

We have released version 0.13.0 of our official examples repository, which introduces a new rootfs build system. Now, DApps can use standard RISC-V binaries, and thus dependencies can be easily added using standard package managers - check it out!
Our development team continues laser-focused on Cartesi Rollups Alpha Release 0.9! The main effort continues on refactorings and new implementations for the validator node’s off-chain code.

DApp Validator Nodes

Our Deployment System and cloud-based Execution Infrastructure is currently being adapted for the architecture simplification that Cartesi Rollups alpha release 0.9 will bring.

Support for Computational Oracles

Zippie’s dev team got a Cartesi Foundation Grant to work on Cartesi’s computational oracle solution (named Cartesi Compute). As reported by Zippie, grant work continues to progress.

Milestones 1 and 2 are in review stage, which includes the following tasks:

ipfs-server, machine-manager changes were approved and published
Added a 8Mb file IPFS download test
Post-development cleanup of docker-compose template and better revert messages
On-going work to update documentation & tutorials with these changes
General clean-up for release preparation

Arbitration for Rollups

We will temporarily pause this work front to concentrate our efforts on the work on the Road to Mainnet.

Automatic Voucher Execution Incentivized by CTSI

⚠ It is important to mention that this feature depends on the scheduler component.

See status update for the Scheduler activity.

Transaction Sequencer Incentivized by CTSI

⚠ It is important to mention that this feature depends on the scheduler component.

See status update for the Scheduler activity.

Noether

Noether is Cartesi’s proof-of-stake system for incentivized blockchain interactions. Node runners and stakers participating in Noether are financially rewarded for promptly executing future Cartesi Ecosystem services, such as the decentralized sequencer, voucher execution, liquidity providers, data availability, and validator claims.

The Scheduler

We temporarily paused the development on the Scheduler to concentrate our efforts on the work on PoS.

Explorer

Staking

Enhancements:

We made changes to improve our score on SEO, accessibility and best practices after checking reports from Google’s lighthouse tool.

Fixes:

We fixed the full-amount Unstake action to avoid imprecision during conversion and leaving dust shares behind.
We fixed the alignment of the content inside the notifications
We fixed the staking pool users page to keep the “Pool info” tab selected.
We fixed the list of retired nodes displayed in the pool management screen. Now, the managers will see the nodes retired by the Pool and not private nodes retired by the manager.

Maintenance:

We retired the feature flags for the staking pool commission and users pages. Now they are fixed features.
We also updated multiple dependencies with particular attention to the Luxon library, which addresses a high-severity vulnerability.

Rollups

We added a rollups-docker file to be able to generate a rollups-explorer image.
We modified our graphQL queries to consume the new backend changes thar provides indexed data from rollups v0.8 and v0.9.

Contribute to Cartesi

Interested in developing with us? We’re always looking for collaborative team players! Feel free to contact us on Discord, check our current career openings, or send your resume along with an introduction to our HR e-mail: hr@cartesi.io

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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