Cartesi: Descartes SDK 0.20

It is of no news that decentralized applications (DApps) are the next big thing, they are already making waves. Building on blockchain is actually the best thing a developer can do right now, as it is safe and more importantly transparent.

This means there is nothing really hidden when it comes to the blockchain, more reason why it is adopted. There are two main problems of deploying on the blockchain, which most developers find as big stumbling blocks:
(a) scalability and
(b) cost effectiveness.

This is where Cartesi project comes in, the two problems are solved. Deploying on Cartesi brings solutions to these and many more, of which few will be mentioned here in this article.

Cartesi is a layer-2 platform for the development and deployment of scalable decentralized applications. This simply means DApps built on Cartesi are composed of both blockchain and off-chain components, the off-chain components runs inside Cartesi Nodes.

DApps deployed on Cartesi get to run on the blockchain, then leverages on the off-chain components to solve problems on the on-chain.

Descartes SDK version 0.20 is now available, this is good news for developers.

Introducing Descartes SDK

This is an infrastructure that DApps use to run computations that normally will be impossible or rather very expensive to execute on-chain. This is because the computations are most of the time complex or the large amount of data to be processed.

With the help of the SDK, DApps can run these computation off-chain. The off-chain component uses the Linux environment, and this does not come in the way of decentralization.

Computations are run by full nodes participating in blockchain smart contracts, this is because there is a maximum computational throughput that the block limit imposes on the network.

This makes it a scarce resource and DApps using the blockchain's native computation competes to have it. And it comes with its expenses too that is most times costly.

Descartes SDK gives the room for DApp participants to make the computations off-chain, this way the fees on-chain are avoided. Now this doesn't mean the computations can't happen on-chain, that depends on the participants if they do not agree on a common ground.

This means honest participants can use the system at little or no cost at all since most are done off-chain, while dishonest ones gets the penalty. In case of a dispute, the blockchain is not required to perform the full computation in order to determine who is behaving dishonestly.

The Descartes SDK gives developers a minimalistic API to run complex computations off-chain with automatic dispute resolution guarantees, developers really do not need to know how Cartesi works.

Highlight of the Descartes SDK