January 2023 Development Recap for Cartesi.

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

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Cartesi

5 min readFeb 15, 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 January’s developments, check out the roadmap diagram below to see what’s new for the Cartesi Machine, Cartesi Rollups, and Noether.

Note: The “Rollups Enhancements” box for Cartesi Rollups has been removed for consistency with other activities that also require documentation but do not show a progress box. Rollups enhancements will be listed directly in the development recap.

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

The work on our Solidity microarchitecture interpreter started based on our C++ microarchitecture interpreter. We automated tests to guarantee that operations don’t behave differently on the C++ microarchitecture interpreter and the Solidity microarchitecture interpreter.

Self-Hosted Distributions

We retook to this work with a more specific focus on improving the developers’ experience and made significant progress regarding the preparation of the root file system and also the installation of dependencies (especially those not available in our customized BuildRoot tool) required by the DApps.
This sudden advance was possible due to the progress on other work fronts which are: the microarchitecture and the support for floating-point and compressed instructions.
We are finishing a prototype and a new release with a self-hosted Ubuntu distro is coming soon!

Infrastructure for Rollups

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

Compressed instructions are under a second round of reviews.
Our C++ emulator for 90% of test-coverage. Lines specifically related to the RISC-V interpreter code paths are 100% covered.

Other improvements

Prototype hypervisor support: KVM debugging phase finished (working on kernel configuration tweaking).
Update to kernel 6.x and move from BBL to OpenSBI is being tested.
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

Development on Rollups alpha release 0.9.0 is our main focus now! On-chain code is ready and the node code (Off-chain) that ties the blockchain to the Cartesi Machine is being adapted.
We are also adapting some examples to illustrate the benefits that our new build system (consequence of the self-hosted distributions workfront explained in a previous section) will bring to developers. Stay tuned!

DApp Validator Nodes

Our Deployment System and cloud-based Execution Infrastructure is currently being adapted for the architecture simplification that Cartesi Rollups alpha release 0.9.0 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 with support for separate IPFS node released
logger-server released
Fix of integration tests of Cartesi Compute to pass CI checking

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

Explorer

Updates from explorer Workfront:

New Features:

We finalised the development to support the PoS v2 transition. The change includes educational content to guide users that run their private node(s) and for pool managers on how to upgrade their pool(s).

Enhancements:

We also improved explorer availability when our backend reindexes blockchain data in one of our environments. That change was necessary due to the latest architecture changes to support better SEO results for Pools with their ENS setup.

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 Rollups is an application-specific 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: