Cartesi (CTSI)
What is Cartesi (CTSI)?
Cartesi is taking smart contracts to the next level. It is solving the urgent problem of scalability and high fees on blockchains by implementing a variant of optimistic roll-ups. Most notably, Cartesi is revolutionizing smart contract programming by allowing developers to code with mainstream software stacks. Noether is Cartesi's side-chain that’s optimized for ephemeral data, providing low-cost data availability to DApps.
What makes Cartesi Unique?
What gives Cartesi a competitive edge as a layer-2 and optimistic rollups solution is that it allows developers to code their smart contracts and DApps directly with mainstream software components and Linux OS resources. That represents more than an incremental improvement to decentralized applications. It is a necessary step toward the maturity of the whole blockchain ecosystem. Allowing mainstream programmability means that DApp developers have an entirely new expressive power to create from simple to rather complex smart contracts. It also means opening the doors for extensive adoption of regular developers who have never programmed for blockchain, as they will create decentralized applications with a coding experience similar to desktop or web.
Key Highlights
- Cartesi is a layer-2 infrastructure for blockchains that allows developers to code highly scalable smart contracts with mainstream software stacks on a Linux VM. Cartesi uses a combination of rollups and side-chains.
- Mainstream programmability: Developers create smart contracts with mainstream software stacks, taking a productive leap from the limited programmability of blockchain-specific VM's to coding with software components supported by Linux.
- Large scalability: Cartesi enables million-fold computational scalability, data availability of large files and low transaction costs. All while preserving the strong security guarantees of the underlying blockchain.
- Privacy guarantees: Cartesi allows for decentralized games where players conceal their data and Enterprise applications that run on sensitive data, preserving privacy on DApps.
- Portability: Cartesi is blockchain-agnostic and will run on top of the most important chains. The current implementations already support Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Matic (Polygon), with Elrond coming soon.
Who Are the Founders of Cartesi?
The most important asset for Cartesi is a team of very strong professionals, researchers and engineers extremely excited to create and implement novelty in the blockchain space.
Cartesi is made up of a team that comes from very high profile backgrounds, real-world experience at top companies such as Microsoft Research, and PhD’s from top universities like ETH Zurich and Princeton.
How Does Cartesi Work?
Cartesi brings streamlined software development workflows to blockchain technology by running a hybrid system of on-chain transactions and off-chain computations.
Cartesi Machine and Noether
In an effort to decrease the amount of heavy computations and temporary data stored on the main blockchain, Cartesi relies on several off-chain components.
The Cartesi Machine is a linux-based virtual machine run by Cartesi nodes and is used to execute dApp computations before broadcasting the computation results to the blockchain. Operating in a linux environment allows dApps to be written in widely-used computer programming languages.
Cartesi’s Noether is a sidechain that functions as a data availability oracle. Noether is capable of temporarily recording and storing data that is only needed in the short term. Disposing of data that was only needed for short periods of time saves space and creates efficiencies over the long term for the blockchain.
On-chain components
The state of a Cartesi Machine and its associated dApps is represented by a cryptographic hash on the blockchain. This hash’s information contains the beginning and ending states of all off-chain dApp functions, which allows the network to ensure honesty and transparency across its off-chain network as well.
Communication with the blockchains is achieved by using Cartesi's variant of optimistic rollups, a scaling solution that executes transactions off-chain and posts transaction data to the main blockchain. This preserves Cartesi’s intent of keeping dApps decentralized and verifiable while offering greater scalability to its network.
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Cryptocurrency