We at Web3 Global recently had the pleasure of Cartesi sponsoring a week of our Web 3 Global Talks on X Spaces. Afterwards, we were able to do a Q&A deep dive with Bruno Maia, Ecosystem Growth Lead at Cartesi. This is what he had to say regarding some of the more technical aspects of what Cartesi is offering, and what they are looking forward to in the future.
1. Can you explain how Cartesi’s integration of a full Linux environment enhances the development of decentralized applications (dApps) compared to traditional blockchain development environments?
In my opinion, the Cartesi Virtual Machine is truly our biggest achievement. Let’s take a step back to fully understand our choices at Cartesi and why they matter for blockchain developers.
We believe the only sustainable and possible way for blockchain tech to achieve mainstream adoption is through the creation of applications that people want, meaning consumer-facing applications that address people’s daily life challenges and needs.
In our view, the current blockchain development environment lacks the expressiveness developers need to build sophisticated applications that can solve real-world problems, generate demand, and drive mass adoption; applications that are essential for the future of the space.
Our novel VM is based on RISC-V (we choose RISC-V because it’s open source and has a simpler instruction set compared with others used, for example, by Intel). On top of this RISC-V, we chose to implement Linux because of its open source nature and coverage (more than 90% of devices in the world run on Linux).
Going back to the question: What value does it bring? It gives developers the full expressiveness of mainstream software development, but now in web3. Having a Linux OS onto the blockchain is much more than simple freedom of choice on programming languages, also you can bring any extra libraries (and there are millions of them available) and all typical OS tooling you can possibly imagine (file systems, zip/unzip files, all digital signatures, ZK libraries, etc).
With that, we are confident in providing the best-in-class execution environment for developers to do more on web3 and create novel and very useful applications.
2. How do Cartesi Rollups provide dedicated computational resources to dApps, and what advantages does this offer in terms of scalability and performance?
It’s related to our architecture design choices for our rollup solution. We have a very nice, general-audience-oriented thesis published back in 2022, stating our design choices and why that matters for doing more in web3 development. For those interested, here’s the link: https://cartesi.io/blog/application-specific-rollups/.
To answer your question, in order to bring a more complex VM, like ours, to life, we have to create a protocol stack that can provide much more computational power than what we find on general purpose blockchains. We do believe computational capacity restraint limits expressiveness and hence limits capacity for developers to create more sophisticated and complex code in the web3. So in that sense, our rollup works as if it was “an appchain,” meaning each application launched will have its sole and unique rollup instant, and the whole execution environment will be dedicated to this unique application. In that way, we can scale computation easily 1000x more than what is possible to execute directly on Ethereum. The catch here is that through our rollup architecture and the dispute game resolution feature, the application running in our rollup has the same security guarantees of the baselayer, which can be Ethereum or other L2 such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and others.
3. In what ways does Cartesi’s modular framework allow developers to customize their dApp’s stack, particularly concerning consensus, data availability, and settlement layers?
We believe that in a complex world, it is very difficult for a single and unique monolithic protocol to cover all different verticals and use cases because every use case has different technical requirements. It’s difficult to imagine that IoT, AI, Gaming, DeFi, and Social applications have the exact same technical requirements. That’s why, with our modular execution layer and its flexible deployment methods, we are aiming to allow developers to deploy rollups or coprocessors with different configurations addressing their technical requirements.
Our plan is to cover our infrastructure with a convenience layer and abstract away the complexities as much as possible so that developers can focus on what matters: Building their applications, bringing them to the market, and generating user adoption, which by itself is a hell of a challenge.
With that in mind, developers won’t have to worry about details on consensus, data availability, and other useless distractions from their main goal; leave those on our shoulders!
4. Could you discuss the role of the Cartesi Virtual Machine and how its RISC-V architecture supports the execution of complex computations within dApps?
RISC-V was chosen because of its simplicity and open-source nature. It’s important to keep in mind that in order to build our dispute game resolution mechanism, we have to implement a copy of our VM directly on the baselayer, meaning on Ethereum. That is the way to guarantee disputes will always be resolved by Ethereum (or other baselayer EVM compatible), and that’s why we can offer in our rollups the same security guarantees from the baselayer.
Our Virtual Machine is the most relevant and important piece of technology of Cartesi’s protocol stack. Everything else is just “delivery mechanisms” designed to deploy our Cartesi VM in different ways, aiming at different use cases and product market fit. On delivery mechanisms, we have the variations: App-specific rollups and our coprocessor. In a nutshell, the first one allows you to create an application from scratch, while the second one aims to give more expressiveness to existing smart contracts, hence the name “coprocessor”.
5. What are some notable projects or proof-of-concept dApps that have been developed using Cartesi Rollups, and what insights have been gained from these implementations?
We have our RollupLab page, which shows the most interesting and jaw-dropping use cases/applications being developed using the Cartesi protocol stack. For those who are interested please take a look at: https://rolluplab.io/.
I would say gaming, DAO/DeSci/DSoC, AI, DeFi/RWA are verticals with very promising use cases. I’d like to bring attention to a few of them: RIVES, DCA.Monster, Drawing Canvas, World Tycoon, Bubblewars, Lilium, and Fastlane among others.
6. How does Cartesi ensure the security and decentralization of computations performed off-chain, and what mechanisms are in place for dispute resolution?
That relies entirely on our permissionless dispute game resolution called Dave, which by the way, was recognized by L2BEAT as the best solution for fraud proofs (here is the tweet about it https://x.com/donnoh_eth/status/1895131860675797143).
Our rollups solution is an optimistic rollup with the fraud proof as the dispute mechanism in place.
In a nutshell, once one of the node validators raises the dispute, they rapidly converge to the instruction they divert. Thanks to the Cartesi VM implementation directly on the baselayer (that’s why we chose RISC-V due to its open source nature and more simple set of instructions to be recreated on Solidity), it’s possible to run the point where is divergence and the result that comes out of Ethereum is the right one and then can be enforced, with the rest of the computation moving ahead.
7. Can you elaborate on Cartesi’s approach to supporting multiple blockchain networks, including Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains, and any plans for future integrations?
We plan to deploy our infrastructure on different EVM compatible networks. At this moment we are covering Ethereum, Optimism, and Arbitrum.
As for integrations, we are currently working on maturing our integration with Espresso, which is giving us composability with other chains/apps. Additionally, we are working on integrating with Avail DA.
Moreover, our new product, the Cartesi coprocessor, is on the alpha stage and will be primarily available on Ethereum, with further expansion to other L2s.
8. How does the Cartesi Compute SDK facilitate the development of dApps that require complex off-chain computations, and what benefits does it offer to developers?
This is what our coprocessor product is about. Imagine the coprocessor as the smart contract “handyman”. The smart contracts are implemented in a constrained environment with limited computation and expressiveness. So, developers can implement in our coprocessor some logic that complements their product, and the only thing the smart contract needs to do is to send a transaction with the inputs to be processed by the coprocessor, which will revert back with the output. All of that with the economic security guarantees of EigenLayer and our validity proofs.
9. What are the primary challenges Cartesi aims to address in the current blockchain ecosystem, and how does its technology propose to overcome these obstacles?
We aim to bring greater expressiveness to the execution environment by expanding computational capacity and providing a VM running an entire Linux OS. We do believe the lack of computational capacity and expressiveness on the execution layer are the key constraints limiting more sophisticated and useful applications to come to life.
10. Looking ahead, what are Cartesi’s strategic goals for the next few years, and how do you envision the platform evolving to meet the needs of the growing dApp development community?
We are aiming to be a key part of the future blockchain infrastructure used by millions of users once mainstream adoption comes to fruition.
For that, we will continue evolving our protocol stack, reinforcing its modular nature and flexibility, and allowing our Cartesi VM, the most important piece of our tech, to be used in different scenarios. The goal is to provide a rich programming environment for developers to build sophisticated and useful decentralized applications that consumers actually want.
Nobody achieves such results alone, and for that we will continue working closely with our protocol partners and continue collaborating with more protocols that fit with our modular architecture.
Join us on this journey and become part of our community: https://linktr.ee/cartesi
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Bruno Maia, Ecosystem Growth Lead at Cartesi – BIO HERE