We’ve recently conducted an AMA in Cryptoverse India’s Telegram Community. The AMA was held with Erick De Moura (CEO of Cartesi) and Colin Steil (COO of Cartesi). Some of the text may have been edited for clarity and grammar.
Jay Ranch — Welcome to Cryptoverse AMA session. We have Erick de Moura (CEO of Cartesi) and Colin Steil (Co-founder & COO of Cartesi). They will be joining us to answer our questions for the next hour.
Colin — Hey all! Glad to be here
Ashish — Hi Colin & eric
Erick — Hello! Thanks for having us here!
Ashish — Welcome to mini-India!
Jay Ranchi — Great to have you!
Jay Ranchi — Let’s get started with the introduction first! Please briefly introduce yourselves and Cartesi to our community.
Colin — Hey all! I’m Colin, Co-Founder and COO of Cartesi. I am a previous venture capitalist and start-up founder with a passion to make blockchain a reality. I have an expertise in execution and years of experience in community building and business operations across the globe. It’s a pleasure to be here and take part in the AMA!
Erick — I’m Erick, Founder and CEO of Cartesi. I’m a software architect and technical leader with 20 years of experience, leading development teams and offered consulting services to tech companies in different verticals. Before getting into blockchain in 2017 I was building production-ready systems for telecom companies, involving big data and analytics. Throughout my career, I gathered extensive experience in software best practices and development processes. Pleased to be here too!
Colin — Cartesi brings a real operating system to blockchains. Cartesi provides a Linux runtime environment for scalable blockchain DApps. Complex and intensive computations run off-chain while preserving the security guarantees of the blockchain. DApps developed with Cartesi are significantly more powerful and easier to build.
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.
Jay Ranchi — Great, I am going to begin with Twitter’s questions first. Thanks to our community for raising some brilliant questions as always.
Q1. What was the motivation of Cartesi and GoBlock to collaborate with each other? How is this collaboration useful for both projects in the long term?
Colin — We are continually looking for reputable organizations to build with Cartesi, pushing our technology and new possibilities that we enable with Cartesi as wide as possible. GoBlock is an exceptional use case as they work with high profile enterprises in Brazil on blockchain projects.
We will work together with GoBlock on a DeFi project applied to energy markets. The system developed by GoBlock is an Ethereum-based Exchange for Energy Derivatives Contracts. It allows for cascaded energy futures contracts to be traded on the blockchain in a secure and transparent way, with counterpart risk mitigation mechanisms. We will apply Cartesi for the computation of open position balances, order matching, and other complex features that would be impractical to run on-chain. This will allow for new financial services on the DeFi platform, such as collateral calculation and new order types, giving more flexibility to traders’ strategies.
Q2. Is Cartesi focusing only on gaming development? Or are there other plans?
Erick — Cartesi is a general-purpose infrastructure that will enable a new wave of apps that were not possible before. We are not limited to gaming. but it is a great showcase given the market for DApps and Cartesi’s tech.
Our first DApp, Creepts, is the world’s first 100% decentralized tournament game running on Linux and involving massive processing.
In Creeps, players compete against each other to see who can claim the highest score in a fully-featured, real-time, browser-based Tower Defense Game map. Players join a tournament by committing their high-scores and game moves to the blockchain, at a negligible cost.
The game’s smart contracts then decide who the winner is. We have a bunch of other plans that will enable exciting new DApps, and as mentioned above, Cartesi is relevant to DeFi and other industries.
Q3. As CEO of Cartesi, what is the value you want to receive from the community and how will it help you improve Cartesi in the future?
Erick — Community is very important to us. We would like everyone’s support to raise awareness about Cartesi and the firsts that we are bringing to the blockchain scene.
In the future, we’ll also be launching an ambassadorial program that will encourage our community to hop on board with Cartesi and spread our product across the globe.
We believe that if more developers start to build with Cartesi, we’ll see a new wave of DApps that were not possible before.
We’d also like the community’s support in testing our tech, finding bugs, or helping us in any possible way. This will help us fine-tune Creepts, Cartesi Core, or any other parts of our infrastructure which will ultimately improve the user and developer experience.
Q4. Can you tell us what the functions of the CTSI (Token of Cartesi) are in the ecosystem? What are some ways users can make a return by joining your network? And why does it contribute to reducing inflation?
Colin — Good question. We’ve just released our light paper which has new information around our token, please take a look for further information here: https://cartesi.io/cartesi_lightpaper.pdf
The Cartesi Token economy has been designed to overcome challenges of usability and scalability of blockchain applications. CTSI is an essential ingredient for the proper functioning of Cartesi’s Data Ledger, which is a PoS-based side-chain for temporary data storage. Block generators receive CTSI mine rewards and fees paid by parties adding data to the ledger.
The Cartesi Token also plays a fundamental role in Cartesi Core’s incentive mechanism. To disincentivize dishonest behaviour, Cartesi Nodes that engage in disputes are required to make collateral deposits in CTSI. This protocol guarantees that if a dispute resolution occurs, honest parties are indemnified while dishonest parties are punished.
We will release more information about Cartesi’s macroeconomy. In summary, as we have more users on the platform, more fees are collected and reverted to rewards for the miners. That incentivizes a higher participation rate, which in turn drives the inflation down.
Q5. What do you think are the issues that Dapp developers are facing today? Is that a reason for you to develop Linux infrastructure like Cartesi?
Colin — We believe DApp developers face a multitude of problems today, having to reinvent software stacks for blockchain that have already existed and have been matured for decades. (…)
This is exactly one of the reasons we are building Cartesi. 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, DApps also suffer tight on-chain processing limits. So, they can hardly offer a compelling alternative to mainstream centralized apps.
They are often hard to build, being clunky and limited for developers and DApp users.
Cartesi solves these problems by:
Offering developers the software and tools supported by a full Linux OS.
Moving off-chain all the heavy computation over large amounts of data, that blockchains cannot do.
Offering services and a token economy that allows users to securely rely on the network and remain free from inconveniences of blockchain tech.
Ashish — Hey Colin do you think dapps are still a hot topic in crypto space these days?
Colin — I do think so! Especially in the gaming and DeFI space, with Cartesi, we hope to expand this into a variety of industries.
Jay Ranchi — It is awesome to hear all these great things about Cartesi. We’re going to be opening the chat for questions.
Q6. Why should Anybody use your platform to deploy DAPPS? Every other project promises dapps. Tell me the main benefits?
Colin — As mentioned in the previous questions, Cartesi is solving the two biggest roadblocks to blockchain adoption — computational limits and difficulty in coding.
It’s hard to imagine a future for decentralized applications without the infrastructure that Cartesi brings to the ecosystem.
Cartesi exists to provide the infrastructure for decentralized applications that are easier for developers to build and with a user experience comparable to Internet applications.
Also, think about all veteran/mainstream software developers that will have a much lower entry barrier to develop DApps!
Q7. What do you consider as the main benefits regarding Cartesi DApps being hybrid? TrueBit seems to be the work most closely related to Cartesi, what advantages does Cartesi have over TrueBit?
Erick — Cartesi DApps will use the software infrastructure the software industry has already been using and that took 30 years to mature. And will also overcome scalability and usability limitations that exist today with blockchain tech.
Regarding TrueBit, it doesn’t offer a runtime environment that can support an operating system. Also, Truebit has a different mechanism of incentive that entails complexity and loss of efficiency. Cartesi departs from the premise that DApp users will achieve local consensus, making it simpler and more efficient. You can see this discussion in further detail on our Medium articles and on the white-paper.
Q8. Cartesi includes a custom VM, called the Cartesi Machine. What is Cartesi Machine and what is it built for?
Colin — The Cartesi Machine is a self-contained and deterministic computational model that can host modern operating systems. Reproducible computations run instead inside Cartesi Machines that are controlled by the Cartesi Node. These are general, fully self-contained Linux systems, that run on a deterministic RISC-V architecture.
Real-world computations happen inside operating systems for good reasons. Developers are trained to use toolchains that operate at the highest possible abstraction level for any given job. These toolchains isolate them from irrelevant hardware details and even from the particulars of a given operating system. Inventing an ad-hoc new architecture would then require the porting of a toolchain and operating system. Instead, Cartesi Machines are based on a proven architecture for which a standard toolchain and operating system are already available.
Q9. Cartesi allows Dapps to be closer to what we experience in the Web2.0. What are Cartesi’s plans for Dapps in Web3.0? and maybe Web 4.0 in the future?
Erick — Actually we can say that the dream of a Web3 is much more tangible now with Cartesi. Cartesi’s mission is to allow for a truly decentralized platform for DApps.
The problem with blockchain applications today is that they suffer from huge usability and scalability limitations — making their experience much worse than the ones Web2.0 applications are able to deliver.
Cartesi is able to make the scalability and usability of DApps much closer to what we are used to on our desktop and mobile apps.
Q10. What are the killer features Cartesi offers other competitors of yours do not?
Colin — Cartesi is a unique project in a certain way. TrueBit and Offchain Labs both have a similar protocol for off-chain computation that involves an interactive dispute resolution (verification game).
However, in our case, we have different choices of virtual machine architecture and cryptoeconomic incentives in order to fulfill our vision. Namely, to provide DApp developers with a wealth of software infrastructure already available for Linux. In that respect, there’s no project that is similar to Cartesi currently.
Q11. There are three common core issues in technology today: scalability, security and reputation. So, how will Cartesi solve these problems?
Erick — In a few words, Cartesi is precisely tackling the scalability issue while retaining the strong security guarantees of the public blockchain (which is Ethereum, for our first versions).
I’m not sure I understand the “reputation” aspect. Differently from other protocols that are based on reputation, Cartesi is fully based on computation that can be verifiable for correctness on-chain. That makes Cartesi much more secure than reputation-based systems that are often the victim of sybil attacks and other vulnerabilities.
Q12. Does the recent COVID-19 affect #Cartesi, especially technically?? What precautionary measures do you have to safeguard your team?? And how will #Cartesi help to fight it?
Colin — Our thoughts are with all those who are affected by the current outbreak that is going on. We hope it gets better soon!
As Cartesi is already a remote team, we are well prepared for a situation like this and our normal business operations are continuing as normal. Apart from volatility in cryptocurrency markets, it will not affect our plans going forward. We are committed to making our layer-2 Linux infrastructure a reality, despite any market situation.
Wishing everyone safety and good health!
Q13. What are the advantages of Cartesi’s to attract DApps developers from other blockchains?
Erick — Cartesi is all about mitigating the adoption barrier for DApp development. It will make it easy for mainstream and veteran developers to onboard decentralization by offering the tools and programming environments they are familiar with.
Another key aspect to keep in mind is that Cartesi as a second-layer system will exist on top of the most important blockchains. Developers that code on top of Cartesi can then easily port their code across the different blockchains.
That will reduce the fear that someone may have of creating a blockchain app that might die if the chosen blockchain fails or is left behind by better blockchains.
Q14. How does your Creepts game work? Is it only available now on your platform? When users could have more? 2. Cartesi has one own token? what is its utility?
Colin — Creepts (https://creepts.cartesi.io) is the world’s first decentralized tower defense tournament game running on Linux.
It is built on top of our layer-2 Linux infrastructure. Currently, Creepts is playable on the Rinkeby Ethereum testnet.
In Creepts, players compete against each other to see who can claim the highest score in a fully-featured, real-time, browser-based Tower Defense game map. Players join a tournament by committing their high-scores and game moves to the blockchain, at a negligible cost. The game’s smart contracts then decide who the winner of the tournament is.
Creepts works now with a fully decentralized version (click how to play on the website) where you can submit your scores but will have to go through a technical setup, or through a read-only version if you just want to check it out. It is available only through these methods at the moment.
In the future, we will be implementing a read-write version where users are completely isolated from the idiosyncrasies of the blockchain and can play Creepts and submit scores in a fully decentralized way directly through the browser.
Q15. When do you plan to launch your own blockchain? The Ethereum you use presently has the problem of scalability, how would you solve this?
Erick — Cartesi doesn’t plan to have its own blockchains. We are sure there are enough awesome blockchain teams out there improving a lot their protocols.
Cartesi is a second layer system that sits on top of Ethereum and will also connect to a number of other relevant consensus layers in the future.
Ethereum indeed has a problem of scalability just like all blockchains do.
That’s exactly why Cartesi is important. It can preserve the decentralization and extreme security of the blockchain while releasing DApps from its computational and throughput limits.
Q16. Your paper is quite complicated, how does all this translate for a common user, not very skilled, who is aware that Cartesi technology exists and wants to make use of it? How can Cartesi beat the competition and help in the world of De-Fi?
Colin — Our whitepaper is very technical orientated for those who are developers. We have recently released additional materials for common users, namely our light paper: https://cartesi.io/cartesi_lightpaper.pdf
I can also recommend reading our introduction Medium articles that give a very good overview of what we are doing. It’s important to us that any user can understand what we are building.
Non-technical overview: https://medium.com/cartesi/the-state-of-blockchain-541f5f6c8c4a
Technical overview: https://medium.com/cartesi/on-linux-and-blockchains-a955a49a84e1
Q17. What value does Cartesi aim to add to the crypto industry that will bring greater abundance to the industry
Erick — The blockchain and crypto industry is in its infancy and undergoing a lot of experimentation.
Cartesi brings the mature tools that have evolved for more than 30 years in the software industry to the hands of people developing applications for blockchain.
Not only DApps will be much more powerful and expressive. The adoption of blockchain will be made much easier with Cartesi.
Erick — Thanks a bunch for your questions, guys. Have a wonderful weekend ahead. And be safe!!
Colin — Thanks everyone for such great questions. If you have any additional questions or want to learn more about Cartesi, make sure to join us in our Telegram group 
Jay Ranchi — It was really awesome to hear all these great things about Cartesi. I enjoyed the way you brokedown Cartesi in simple terms. Thank you, Erick and Colin, for making the time to be with us!
Ashish — 🙏 PLEASURE GUYS
Important Links:
Website: https://cartesi.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject
Telegram: https://t.me/cartesiproject
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS
GitHub: https://github.com/cartesi