Meet the Founders
Erick de Moura — Cartesi CEO
With the wheels well and truly in place for Cartesi to become a major cog in the engine of smart contract and DApp development, we wanted to give our community the opportunity to know more about the project’s founders.
In this article we take a look into what drives Erick de Moura, Cartesi CEO, to work towards making the power of DApps available to the wider developer community, and we ask some questions that will paint a picture of what the future looks like for Cartesi and blockchain technology.
With over 20 years of experience in the software industry, Erick has spent his professional working life fusing innovative software design with academia to deliver comprehensive solutions to tech companies in a myriad of sectors, including Fintech, Healthtech, E-commerce and more. With degrees in Electrical Engineering from both the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and the University of California, Erick has in-depth knowledge of software engineering and architecture.
In the blockchain space and as CEO of Cartesi, Erick works towards combining the infinite power of DApps with the scalability and cost-efficiency of mainstream software stacks.
What made you get into blockchain?
In 2017, I started to experiment with cryptocurrency trading. Trading was an exciting activity that led me to keep up-to-date with the innovations in the blockchain space. Meanwhile, I was working on a personal software project to track token price and aggregate data from different exchanges. In a short period of time, I became aware of the potential of blockchain itself, it struck me as an immense technological breakthrough with profound implications to society.
In 2018 I was contemplating several business opportunities for a new technical startup, several of them in the blockchain space itself. That is when I received a call from a good friend from university. Diego Nehab was working at IMPA in Rio de Janeiro with his colleague Augusto Teixeira to create a decentralized marketplace for AI training on Ethereum.
They wanted me to be the CEO of a company that would take their idea to a product and a real software business.
What do you see as the industry’s biggest bottleneck to mainstream adoption currently?
The usability of public blockchains seems to be the biggest bottleneck. Limited scalability is a very well-known problem, a difficult one, given that it is hard to provide high throughput and low fees while truly maintaining security and decentralization.
The other aspect of usability relates to the concepts, tools and software components smart contract developers need to master. They are difficult to grasp, use and also much less expressive than the software stacks available for mainstream applications (e.g. web, mobile, desktop).
This creates a huge gap that most software developers don’t dare to transpose. If most developers don’t come, then the glory of the blockchain ecosystem cannot be realized. Applications are limited and come at a lower cadence, with most potential consumers alienated from this industry.
How do you see Cartesi helping to address these issues in order to build the bridge between mainstream and blockchain?
Cartesi is definitely aiming at the heart of this problem, with the mission of bridging the gap between the broader world of development and blockchains.
Marc Andreessen famously said that “software is eating the world”. That is undeniable, but that’s what you see from the distance. If you watch closer, you will see Linux behind almost everything. According to Alexa’s data, 96% of the top 1 million web servers run Linux. And more than 80% of smartphones run Android, which is a modified version of the Linux kernel.
Linux is the fertile soil supporting myriad open-source software stacks. These stacks are like monumental technological artifacts, structures and layers, invisible to the untrained eyes, but intricate software structures that took billions of hours of coding to be developed. These structures have been evolving for decades, non-stop and that’s what empowers application developers, giving them massive expressive power. Mainstream developers stand on the shoulders of these gigantic software structures.
When developers come to blockchains they don’t have Linux or any OS to develop their smart contracts. They are back to the dawn of programming.
Cartesi empowers existing blockchain DApp developers to create more complex and compelling DApps with mainstream software components. But there’s more to it, Cartesi will also open the door to mainstream developers without any previous experience in the domain of blockchain to easily participate in this new exciting ecosystem.
What do you see the next 5 years in smart contract development looking like for Cartesi?
Cartesi is putting a lot of work to make rollups available in 2021. Cartesi Rollups will enable a whole new spectrum of possible decentralized applications. Besides, a majority of developers that were intimidated by Solidity or blockchain development in general will start to join Cartesi’s bandwagon.
“There will be a lot of work to be done. We will march toward better and better usability, performance, education, and interoperability with several blockchains in the following years.”
As it progresses, Cartesi will see a rich and diverse community of software developers that will build a whole new ecosystem that will ultimately fade away the boundaries that today exists between mainstream and blockchain application development.
We can see many interesting applications, not only in DeFi. But in gaming, AI, and social media. But the future has the habit of showing humans very interesting surprises. Back to the origin of HTTP and the Mosaic browser in the 90’s, it wasn’t easy to foresee Airbnb, Uber and Clubhouse. We are at the verge of something that promises to change the Internet.
“Blockchain projects like Ethereum, Elrond and Avalanche, integrated with the programmability and processing power of Cartesi, will allow for new applications and business models that we can only start to imagine at this point.”
What has been the most memorable moment for you working in the space in the last 5 years?
Closing and executing Cartesi’s IEO on Binance Launchpad last year. It was particularly exciting to present Creepts, our tower defense game at that time and watch the enthusiasm of thousands of people, as they competed and shared their gameplays.
Name another project you think could help shape the future of blockchain besides Cartesi?
I believe some blockchains projects like Ethereum, Elrond, Matic, Cardano and Polkadot will keep bringing immense contributions to the space. At this point, I am particularly happy to see the amazing progress of Elrond and their collaboration with Cartesi.
I believe that we have a lot to help each other, with the well aligned vision to increase the adoption scope with global off-chain execution power and mainstream programmability.
Cartesi’s Ecosystem Links:
Website: https://cartesi.io
Explorer: https://explorer.cartesi.io
Discord (Development Community): https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject
Telegram: https://t.me/cartesiproject
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/cartesiannouncements
GitHub: https://github.com/cartesi
