September 2022 Development Recap for The Blockchain OS.

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

Published in

Cartesi

6 min readSep 21, 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 September’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 full emulator, compiled for the microemulator, passed all unit tests. Enabling optimizations when producing binaries to run in the microemulator produced smaller and faster code. The microarchitecture can now also be controlled remotely via the gRPC interface.

Self-Hosted Distributions

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

Infrastructure for Rollups

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

Released Machine Emulator SDK v0.12.0 with:

- Toolchain v0.11.0.
- RootFS v0.14.0.
- Linux Kernel v0.13.0.
- ROM v0.12.0.
- Machine Emulator v0.11.0.
- Server Manager v0.4.0.

Support for running DApps with a non-root user.
Support for GRPC Health Check protocol on Server Manager
Machine Emulator with Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) enabled.
Removed dehash device and related tools.
Started the work to migrate the emulator to the new RISC-V 1.12 specification.
Continued investigating RISC-V Hypervisor extension support.
Continued work on updating the Linux Kernel to the latest LTS version (5.18.14).
Continued the research on possible improvements of the off-chain microservices architecture.

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 launched Cartesi Rollups 0.6.0 and Rollups-Examples 0.9.0, and with that, we brought the following features to our community:

Support for Arbitrum Goerli and Optimism Goerli: all contracts and tools now support deploying and running Cartesi DApps using either Arbitrum or Optimism testnets as a base layer.
An improved version of our Inspect State endpoint that builds upon the first preliminary version from Rollups 0.5.0., and that can now better handle concurrent calls.
An updated version of the SQLite DApp example that leverages the new Inspect State feature to show how to directly query a DApp’s state without the need for submitting layer-1 transactions.

DApp Validator Nodes

Our Deployment System is under internal testing and stabilization, with the deployment of 7 of our example DApps on Ethereum Goerli Testnet. They are publicly available at our cloud-based Execution Infrastructure and can be accessed by anyone. Click here to check it out!

Rollups Enhancements

Rollups are now using the newest Cartesi Machine emulator version with the TLB cache enabled, which brings very significant performance improvements
Web environments for quick-starts are back! Jump into a ready-to-use working environment directly inside your browser to start playing with Cartesi DApps without having to install anything!

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

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

We continue testing our new Noether node (PoS 2.0) on Testnet.
We started analyzing and fixing the security vulnerability of the smart contracts.

The Scheduler

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

Explorer

We have done a few releases since the last dev update:

Version v2.6.1:

We fixed a problem when trying to deposit using the Gnosis Safe wallet on the new staking page.
We added Google Tag Manager to the project to support efforts from the Marketing team related to traffic data aggregation.
We fixed a problem that shows in a specific case when a pool manager is trying to hire a node to a freshly created pool.

Version v2.6.2:

We changed all page titles in the Cartesi explorer, so it does not match the main Cartesi website and facilitate data aggregation for the Marketing team on Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

Version v2.7.0:

We improved the UX for users related to their connected wallet (screenshots below).
We are currently revisiting all the new management pages on node-runners.
We’re also working on the new design for the list of pools page (Stake menu option).
We deployed changes to the backend in the staging environment to support the upcoming “Pool Analytics” features. This set of features encompasses eligibility, commission changes, and total users engaged in a pool over time.
And last but not least, we started a discussion regarding changes to be done on Explorer for PoS v2.

Desktop view for the new wallet-connected UI

Mobile view for the new wallet-connected UI

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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