July 2022 Development Recap for The Blockchain OS.

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

Published in

Cartesi

5 min readJul 19, 2022

Looking for the latest developments on the components of The Blockchain OS? 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 The Blockchain OS to the production level — to where a beautiful and diverse DApp ecosystem can flourish and grow.

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

For a quick overview of July’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

The first prototype of the micro emulator implementation is complete. Running the Cartesi Machine emulator in the micro emulator now produces the same results as running the Cartesi Machine emulator directly in the host. For example, we can verify that the state hashes match after booting and executing Linux in the Cartesi Machine - emulated both ways.

Self-Hosted Distributions

Experimentation with Gentoo self-hosted distribution and Alpine Linux were temporarily paused for our team to concentrate all energy on the new Cartesi Rollups 0.3.0 release and the microarchitecture work fronts.

New Features’ Documentation

The documentation is complete and under team review. We may still add more examples to better illustrate some topics.

Infrastructure for Rollups

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

Released the Machine Emulator SDK v0.11.0.
Released the first version of the Echo DApp using the Lua programming language.
Updated all Machine Emulator SDK docker images to Ubuntu 22.04.
Started the development of the Echo DApp using Javascript. (And required dependencies.)
Bumped the buildroot version to 2022.02.3 on image-rootfs.
Started the work on the InspectState service.
Updated the host-server-manager to support the InspectState service.
Started work on running Dapps without root privileges.

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

Cartesi Rollups 0.4.0 and Rollups-Examples 0.7.0 were launched at the beginning of this month!
The new Cartesi Rollups release brought an improved exception handling mechanism and with this change, if the application dies, the exit code will be captured and an exception will be raised. No more tainted sessions!

We’re continuing to add examples to show developers how to use our solution, the new ones are:

The first example showing how to code a Cartesi Rollups DApp using the Lua programming language, which is a very popular programming language in the game industry.
A new variation of our C++ example. This time we will show how to code a C++ DApp using ioctl (input/output control) to make calls at the device level of the Linux OS instead of using the HTTP API.
Our “ERC20 Deposit” example was enlarged to show how to encode vouchers, although it is not possible to execute them yet.

DApp Validator Nodes

Good news for those that experimented with our Cartesi Testnet Infrastructure through our Echo DApp as announced in the last recap. Click here if you haven’t yet.

We accomplished Milestone I! The infrastructure in alpha stage is up and has an Example DApp running on it since mid-June and can be accessed by anyone.
Milestone II is 75% done! We already have the first implementation for our automated deployment procedure that is being tested internally. When it is ready, all developers in our community will be able to deploy their Cartesi Rollups DApps in the Cartesi cloud-based infrastructure. Stay tuned!

Rollups Enhancements

We started exercising our new HTTP API to query the state of the DApp backend running inside the Cartesi Machine.

Support for Computational Oracles

We temporarily paused the discussions about how to move our Computational Oracle forward to keep our team concentrated on the Cartesi Rollups and Microarchitecture work fronts.

Arbitration for Rollups

We have been working a lot on automated tests and currently, we are focusing on the components: MemoryManager, SpliceMachine, and SpliceOutputs.
We decided to migrate the test framework used from Dapptools to Foundry. Although Foundry is a reimplementation of Dapptools, it has many additional features like supporting multiple solc versions.

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 side chain for data availability. It is the part of Cartesi’s solution that will enable blockchain applications to use much more data than would be possible with Ethereum or other base layers.

Noether Version 2.0: Upgrade from PoS to PoS 2.0

The implementation of a more modular design is finished and we started analyzing and improving the gas cost.

The Scheduler

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

Explorer

For the new node-runners UI Revamp the good news are:

The creation steps page for a private node and public pool is in place.
The landing page is about to be finalized…
The management pages for both the private node and public pool have most of the UI structure in place but there is still work to complete.
Regarding the new staking pool feature, the development is ongoing, including automated tests.

Contribute to The Blockchain OS

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

The Blockchain OS is a decentralized layer-2 infrastructure that supports Linux and mainstream software components. For the first time, developers can code scalable smart contracts with rich software tools, libraries, and the services they’re used to, bridging the gap between mainstream software and blockchain.

Cartesi is enabling millions of new startups and their developers to use The Blockchain OS and bring Linux applications on board. With a groundbreaking virtual machine, optimistic rollups, and side-chains, Cartesi paves the way for developers of all kinds, to build the next generation of blockchain apps.

Welcome to The Blockchain OS, home to what’s next.

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