Cartesi Labs
Hello, Ultrachess milestone updates.
A Cartesi Labs grant-supported project bringing fully decentralized chess to your hands.
In October, we announced the first fully on-chain chess application backed by Cartesi’s Rollup technology, Ultrachess. Ultrachess allows users to put real value on the line and play chess with more than just their Elo at stake.
Additionally, Ultrachess introduces a unique feature that doesn’t exist in the current scope of chess: user-deployed chess engines. This allows for humans and bots to coexist in an ecosystem where action is amplified through economics and incentives.
For those eagerly awaiting updates, look no further.
Hello, Milestone 1 — Cartesi Testnet Deployment
Ultrachess is nearing an open beta testing phase — are you ready? In the meantime, the Cartesi community will be delighted to hear that development is going smoothly during the incubation phase.
Most of Ultrachess’ base features have been successfully implemented. Users can engage in on-chain chess matches, tournaments (knockout and eventually swiss and round robin), wager stablecoins, and deploy their own RISC-V compiled chess engines to compete in autonomous battles.
Each bot runs within a Firejail sandbox to prevent malicious bot code from contaminating the application state. Users can specify the automatic matchmaking preferences of their bots; wager amounts, match frequency, and coming soon, other metrics such as opponent elos, match history and account balance.
Hello, future developments.
Currently under development is Ultrachess’ machine entropy. This will ensure chess engines operate exactly as they would in a traditional machine. Pseudo-randomness can be generated in multiple fashions within different engines so it is imperative that we implement a robust solution that captures all of these possibilities to eliminate the risk of bad actors manipulating the system.
Currently both bot bytecode and metadata is stored within the machine directly and uploaded through a base layer transaction. Currently, interesting DeFi experiments are being worked on in Ultrachess to generate protocol yield on deposited assets and liquidity for a base token. The idea is that users will deposit their stable coins and these stable coins will get run through DeFi legos to generate more protocol revenue before they ever make it to the L2.
For Ultrachess, users will also potentially generate liquidity for a base token by purchasing Uniswap W3 NFTs that will be represented in-game as evolving chess piece skins. 16 concentrated liquidity positions correlate to 16 chess pieces. Other NFT metrics will also potentially manifest into different skin traits. But this is one idea and many others could be implemented and operate in parallel due to the composable nature of DeFi.
Zooming in on the DApp user experience.
The Ultrachess app will function almost indistinguishably from a Web2 app, the kind of gaming experience chess lovers are already familiar with! So what’s different? Ultrachess will give users the ability to dive deep into Web3 UX by allowing players to sign in using traditional auth prompts (for example web3auth) as well as traditional Web3 wallets (Metamask, etc).
Users will also be able to view as much data on DApp and Machine State as possible: chess engine bytecode, move evaluations, search depth, virtual CPU cycles consumed per move, TX history etc. More data means more exploration. More exploration means more potential use cases and paradigms to dial in on.
As a result, entire ecosystems will be built on each of these data sets, for example, predictions on chess engine search depths, incentivization of chess bots to decrease. In addition to enabling exploration, more data instills confidence within users. Allowing users to view the state of your DApp down to its assembly calls (and other compute resources) gives them more confidence in the transactions they submit (Etherscan is a great example of this)!
With more updates currently in development, make sure you keep up to date with Ultrachess and how to get early access via the Ultrachess Discord:
Or follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ultrachessorg
From blockchain game development to application of Cartesi tech to address problems in sustainability, learn more about Cartesi Labs:
As always, if you have an idea, want to help with research, or have an existing project, make sure to apply to our Ecosystem Fund: the Cartesi Labs program!
Photo c/o Nasik Lababan
About Cartesi
Cartesi Rollups is a modular execution layer that elevates simple smart contracts to decentralized Linux runtimes. It allows developers to launch highly scalable rollup chains, and code decentralized logic with their favorite languages and software components.
- Every DApp has its own high-performing rollup chain;
- No cannibalization of resources from other DApps in Cartesi’s ecosystem;
- No network gentrification;
- Enable an entirely new class of DApps that currently cannot run on EVM chains;
- Preserve the strong security guarantees of the underlying blockchain
Follow Cartesi across official channels:
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