Cartesi’s AMA Recap with Blockchain United - 23rd October
Some of the questions, answers, responses and sequences may have been edited or modified for clarity and readability.
We present the Recap:
Q1: Can you tell us a little about herself?
Helen — I’m Helen IMAH, a Computer Scientist.
I have been a blockchain enthusiast since 2015, and got fully involved in 2017 as an ICO investor. My crypto experience includes trading, social media marketing and branding.
My aim is to always do what’s within my capacity to positively exceed expectations for the right people.
It’s been an interesting journey so far.
Q2: What are your roles at Cartesi?
Helen — My roles at Cartesi include but not limited to these one:
- Communicate the vision and what Cartesi represents to like-minded individuals, groups/teams.
- Assist and take initiative on orchestrating events, meetups (both virtual and physical).
- Assist with testing new products (DApps), and new properties online (such as websites, etc).
Q3: Could you tell us the vision of Cartesi is in Nigeria?
Helen — Cartesi Nigeria is a subset of Cartesi project. We have a clear vision and goal; closing the gap between centralized and decentralized applications for Nigerians in terms of power, possibility, convenience and security.
We have a digital presence in Nigeria via social media both on Twitter and Facebook which is one step to gaining awareness in the nation. We really hope to have an active community in this part of the world.
I will be sharing our community links towards the end of this event. Ensure to wait till the end of this event so as to have the full gist, and other benefits.
Q4: What can you tell us about the Cartesi project team?
Helen — The most important asset for Cartesi is a team of very strong researchers and engineers extremely excited to create and implement novelty in the blockchain space.
A highlight of the founders can be seen below:
Our CEO, Erick de Moura (CEO) is a technical leader with deep experience in system design and development. Erick’s specialties include software architecture, process definition, and execution. As a consultant, developer and business owner before Cartesi itself, he has dedicated 20 years to the software industry and was pivotal in the success of several tech companies in different verticals such as Fintech, Healthtech, E-commerce, and Infrastructure.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickdemoura/
Augusto Teixeira, PhD (Chief Scientific Officer)
A mathematician with a Ph.D. from ETH-Zurich and a post-doc from Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris. Augusto is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro where he specializes in probability and graph theory. Expert in crypto-economics and is connecting the Cartesi architecture to Ethereum and Turing-complete blockchains. Throughout his career, he published 28 publications and academic papers. Website: http://www.impa.br/~augusto/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/augusto-teixeira-39a3a8169/
Diego Nehab, PhD (CTO)
A computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a post-doc from Microsoft Research. Diego is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro where he is a member of the visual computation group. An expert in computer graphics, image processing, and massive parallelism (GPGPU), was granted 3 patents, published 36 articles and scientific papers, and received more than 1900 citations. Website: http://www.impa.br/~diego/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diegonehab/
Colin Steil (COO)
Execution master with years of experience in community and business operations across the globe. Colin is a previous venture capitalist and start-up founder with a specialty in the Asian ecosystem. Colin first got involved in blockchain in early 2017 and began working with blockchain technology, crypto exchanges and ICO projects in the venture capital industry.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinsteil/
You can learn more about the brains behind Cartesi from here: https://cartesi.io/en/about/#founders
Segment 2 : Community Questions
What is Cartesi centered on?
Helen: Cartesi is an Operating System for DApps that bridges mainstream technology with the blockchain world.
However, it’s not only about bridging the gap between a real OS and blockchain and providing virtually unlimited computational power. The most important asset for Cartesi is a team of very strong researchers and engineers extremely excited to create and implement novelty in the blockchain space.
Scalability is a multidimensional problem. With Cartesi Core and Descartes we empower first and foremost computation. With upcoming roll-ups, we can essentially have smart-contracts being implemented and running on Linux. With the Side Chain, we can achieve much higher throughput, lower latencies, and cheaper temporary storage for DApps.
With these systems in place, we get something that could be analogous to general-purpose Linux servers, however, decentralized, efficient, and with the same security guarantees that the blockchain provides.
What are the problems that Cartesi stands to solve?
Helen: Cartesi solves three major problems which are highlighted below:
1) offering developers the software and tools supported by a full Linux OS;
2) moving off-chain all the heavy computation over large amounts of data, that blockchains cannot do;
3) offering services and a token economy that allows users to securely rely on the network and remain free from inconveniences of blockchain tech (e.g. slow confirmation times, requirement to remain online to resolve disputes, and others).
How did CARTESI come to existence, and what benefits does it have for the Nigerian participants?
Helen: The main focus of Cartesi around the tech and blockchain space is to close the gap between centralized and decentralized applications, both in terms of possibility and convenience.
Nigerians do have an equal chance of participation in the Cartesi ecosystem as; developers, investors, partners, traders, and so on.
An individual can decide on which is best he/she fits in after knowing the ecosystem to some extent.
How does CARTESI run and what are the requirements of using the ecosystem?
Helen: Cartesi is blockchain agnostic. What this means is that we can potentially run on any underlying blockchain. It’s a bridge between Linux and blockchain, the first of its kind in the Tech industry.
For the second part of your question, building on Cartesi at the moment will require some knowledge of smart contract development however we aim to isolate developers completely from the idiosyncrasies of the blockchain down the road.
To achieve this, Cartesi has made a SDK which is called Descartes. The Descartes SDK makes it possible for developers to build computationally intensive DApps with all software tools available for a full Linux operating system. DApps preserve full decentralization and the security guarantees of Ethereum.
Developers and software enthusiasts can easily access the Documentation Portal through Cartesi’s redesigned website at https://cartesi.io/docs. The portal provides tutorials and the information needed to begin coding with Cartesi.
What does Cartesi tend to offer to make them spectacular?
Helen: Cartesi is a unique innovation!
By offering a Linux runtime environment, Cartesi is the only software-based verifiable off-chain compute system that gives developers a vast array of software that evolved in the last 30 years and that enable the applications we use on the Internet today.
Other factors that distinguish us from others include but not limited to:
i. our protocol allows decentralized applications to be run on Linux in a way that’s verifiable by the blockchain.
ii. complex processing can be executed off-chain free from blockchains’ computational limits and corresponding fees.
When will Cartesi be available so that other projects can be built on it?
Helen: Cartesi is an established project already. We have good reputations around the blockchain/crypto world. We also have working products and still counting. And if the availability you meant is in terms of tokenization, then I would like to inform you that the native token of Cartesi is CTSI in symbol. Tradable on popular crypto exchanges such as; Binance, WazirX, Tokocrypto, Upbit, Coinone, Uniswap, 1inch.Exchange, Mooniswap,Gate.io, IDEX, and more!.
Creepts is also a functioning product of Cartesi which happens to be the First Fully Decentralized Tower Defense DApp. You may want to learn more about Creepts, especially the gamers in the house: https://creepts.cartesi.io/en/
Can you please highlight more on the decentralization aspect using your technology? Also, in the future, is it possible to quantify the level of decentralization and economic incentivization?
Helen: No software application is built in isolation. Mainstream mobile/desktop/web Applications today depend on multiple software dependencies that took decades to mature on operating systems like Linux. Cartesi brings all this software infrastructure to blockchain applications. Whereas without Cartesi, blockchain applications cannot use mainstream software, libraries and services, unless they sacrifice decentralization in some way.
Then, there’s the second problem. Besides being hampered by insufficient software infrastructure, decentralized applications also suffer tight on-chain processing limits. So, they can hardly offer a compelling alternative to mainstream centralized applications. They are often hard to build, being clunky and limited for developers and DApp users.
Similarly, in our case, we have different choices of virtual machine architecture and crypto economic incentives in order to fulfill our vision.
What is the total liquidity for this project and is it here to stay or just for the meantime?
Helen: The team is committed to maintaining very high quality liquidity for the project, both on centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges (having recently opened up additional pairs of DAI and USDC on Uniswap/1inch).In addition,no entity or token holder is more interested in the health of CTSI’s economy than the Foundation itself for its entire existence and longevity. The Foundation liquidates only the amounts deemed necessary, remaining careful not to disturb the secondary markets of CTSI.
What is the place of Cartesi in the NFT and DEFI gaming sector?
Helen: Of course, we all know that there are so many crypto developments around the NFT and DeFi gaming sector. At Cartesi, we are highly confident in our technology and vision. There is no other project that has the long-term potential in making DApps and blockchains mainstream than Cartesi.
Cartesi is all about bridging the mainstream software tech with the blockchain world. The most important asset for Cartesi is a team of very strong researchers and engineers extremely excited to create and implement novelty in the blockchain space.
Cartesi can be instrumental to the whole development of the NFT world. One of the things you can do if you are a game developer is to create fully decentralized games or virtual worlds where in-game assets can have their ownership computationally asserted by Cartesi. The team is working day and night on making all of this a reality and has something very special coming this quarter. Anticipate for it!
What other features should we expect from Cartesi in the future?
Answer: Cartesi’s protocol will enable exterior DApp and DeFi creators to solve future problems for the unbanked, by enabling them to create applications that rival traditional banks, while guaranteeing the security of blockchain technology.
People could use Cartesi to build any financial instrument that involves computations that are too complex to be performed on-chain. One example for that would be to build services for options and other derivatives. Cartesi would also make it possible to build a “verifiable centralized exchange”, where a currently centralized exchange could have its computations verified by any interested party.
Cartesi will as well help interoperability between blockchains and services such as the futures and insurance markets.
The team is currently exploring a number of projects.
In this quarter, part of our plans at Cartesi are these ones:
a. Launch mining on Mainnet
b. Release of P2P Service GRPC (Google Remote Protocol Core)
You can see other exciting milestones we are having for the future: https://cartesi.io/static/roadmap-mobile-f29432b765aebbfba4a1755c791a7b2e.svg
We would like you to be a part of our growing community if you aren’t already. We’re inviting you to join us on our social media platforms, and on Telegram!
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CartesiNigeria
Join us on Telegram: https://t.me/CartesiProject
See our Official Website: https://cartesi.io/
Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/588520218517225/
