Cartesi Ecosystem Recap #12

Ecosystem/Aug 9, 2024/Siannie Quartero

August 2nd - July was a crazy month, with EthCC as the highlight of it. Cartesi participated in a total of seven events: two we hosted/co-hosted, and five we participated in as partners/sponsors. The highlight of the week was the Drinks & Debate event with Cartesi where we were joined by some incredible speakers from top-tier projects in the space talking about important topics such as interoperability and fraud proofs! Spoiler alert, Felten got spicy and jumped on the first panel.

Let’s also celebrate the Honeypot hitting the 1M CTSI mark and remaining uncracked!

But more on those two points later, let’s first cover the Dev Recap Call updates and see what Cartesi has been cooking.

Cooking with Cartesi (Tech Updates)

Check out the last live dev recap to hear from the units pushing forward on development.

Highlights

Compute Unit
- Cartesi as a crypto-economic Linux co-processor
  - Leveraging EigenLayer
  - Co-processor = a stateless offchain system
- The goal?
  - To be able to use the existing Cartesi CLI to build extensions to existing smart contracts using the power of Cartesi
- Live demo at 2:11
- Pre-production mainnet deployment coming soon
Node Unit
- Cartesi Rollups Node v1.5.0 release
- Fixed deployment bug due to epoch closing
- Full guide available here
DevAd Unit
- Two release candidates for docs v.1.5
- Added new tutorials
- Architecture page has been remodelled
- New community tools page
- Mugen site updates
  - Udemy v2 released
  - Builder Bounty added

Don't forget to mark your calendar for our next Monthly Dev Recap Call on Monday, September 2nd with a refreshed format! Connect with core contributors directly and learn about what they’re shipping. Feedback is always welcome, so please if you have any, let them know over on Discord!

Ecosystem News

The Cartesi Honeypot challenge has now exceeded 1 million CTSI, and no vulnerabilities have been found! As it remains unbroken, it demonstrates Cartesi Rollups’ robust security and resilience. Read more on this milestone here.

Feeling confident you can crack it? Be our guest and go for it.

Have you been playing around with RIVES? RIVES is an onchain fantasy console built on Cartesi, and they’re continuously shipping! Here are some updates you might have missed:

A new game jam is coming on the 8th of August and will last until the 15th. This time they’re partnering with Forgotten Runes (the world’s largest decentralized fantasy franchise) to bring you a magical experience.
- Forgotten Runes is bringing in special prizes on top of the base prize pool, plus beautiful sprites to use! The theme is magic, so be sure to make it magical!
- On top of providing beautiful sprites, Forgotten Runes is also giving special NFTs if you use their sprites.
- All info can be found here: https://itch.io/jam/rives2
A new RIVES cartridge is live - Life is Hard, a Conway game of life implementation by Lyno.
- Learn more about the game here.
- They’ve also wrapped up the contest, and congratulations to Marcus for absolutely obliterating the leaderboard.

So much to look forward to on the RIVES front, so be sure to follow them on X and join their Discord to stay up to date.

Bug Buster, a trustless bug bounty platform powered by Cartesi Rollups, has launched on the Optimism Sepolia testnet! Why Bug Buster? Bug Buster enhances bounty programs by implementing onchain logic, offering software developers stronger security guarantees for their users, and ensuring a dispute-free experience for ethical hackers. We’re inviting all white hat hackers, bug bounty hunters, and researchers on this journey! It currently offers a bug bounty for the Solidity compiler.

And keep your eyes peeled on when it’ll hit mainnet 👀

Curious about other projects in the Cartesi ecosystem? Go to rolluplab.io for an overview of all projects built with Cartesi.

Have you seen the new DevAd Bug Bounties? It's a fun way to dive into Web3, get the basics of Cartesi with video tutorials, and start building. Complete it, and you'll earn $30, plus you'll unlock a bunch of other cool opportunities in our growing ecosystem.

The DevAd ‘I build, therefore I am’ has uploaded three new episodes, which you can check out here.

Also, peep Cartesi on The DApp List.

Grants

The CGP has been in full force, with another proposal hitting Snapshot. World Tycoon hit the snapshot last Monday. World Tycoon is a fully onchain city-building game built on Cartesi. Build your cities from the ground up using in-game funds, powered by novel cryptography and play-to-earn incentives. The full proposal can be found here.

The CGP has seen growth over the first wave with 49 proposals submitted and reviewed! So far, $141,000 has been awarded for four projects, with seven more proposals under review. Another update is that past the initial review stage, proposals will now be reviewed in public on Discord in the #cgp-questions channel.

Interested in building with us and getting funded? Click here to apply.

Progress has been made on the DevAd Seed Grant front as well, a fast-track grant for Cartesi:

CartDevKit - CLI tool helping bootstrap a full-stack project repo for building on Cartesi.
- Seed Grant completed
- Frontend fully integrated with Apollo SDK for GraphQL interactions
Smart Bus - Smart management of public transit.
- Proposal accepted
- Milestone one received
  - Currently being reviewed
PrivadoID
- Live on Polygon-Amoy
- Working on a new idea for a decentralized credential issuer
Peeps - Social media platform bringing together traditional micro-blogging with DeFi
- Completed their grant
- Complete wallet integration for managing assets on the platform
- Live on Arbitrum Sepolia
Prism - Turning NFTs into wearable art.
- Video tutorial on the stable diffusion
- Deployed on Sepolia
- First user created
- Finalising frontend

For an up-to-date overview of all ongoing DevAd Seed Grants projects, check it out here. If you’ve got an idea for a build, check out the Cartesi Grants Program or DevAd Seed Grants and apply for a grant today!

Community

The Defiant interviewed Gabriel C and Luca from L2beat about fraud proofs and the importance of collaboration in improving them.

Erick wrote an op-ed with CryptoSlate on the modular stack where they explore how modularity isn't just a technical improvement but a strategic shift in how blockchain infrastructure is designed, offering a stronger foundation for future applications. Additionally, check out Guilherme’s article exploring how we can upgrade Web3 applications securely and trustlessly, and which trade-offs come into play.

Events

As briefly mentioned before, July was an intense month for Cartesi on the events side of things. The vibes at EthCC were impeccable, as can be seen on Felipe’s face.

The week started with the Back to the Future event that we co-hosted with Espresso. The evening consisted of two panels, and drinks - a lot of drinks. The topics of the evening were Modularity and Bitcoin L2s. They weren’t your average panels either. To spice things up a bit, we asked the attendants to write random words and put them in a bucket for the participants to use during their talks. Those who managed to implement all five words received a prize.

Want to know who won? Watch the full panels here:

Panels moderated by The Rollup (Andy & Robbie)

Speakers: Felipe Argento (Cartesi), Ben Fisch (Espresso), Kyle Arojas (Avail), Vince Yang (zkLink), Carsten Munk (Cartesi), Verity Coltman (Espresso), Brett Maverick (Gelato), Dominik Harz (BOB), Orkun Kilic (Citrea).

Cartesi was also part of the Ethereum United event by Espresso, where they invited other incredible players in the game to be part of it. The goals? As stated in the title, to unite Ethereum. Core contributors Bruno and Siannie were there, chatting with the Eurocup fans.

Jumping to the highly anticipated Cartesi event of the week - Modular Security, Drinks & Debate with Cartesi, an intimate event focused on in-depth discussions on the topic of fraud-proofs and cross-rollup interoperability, with guests from L2Beat, Bankless, Celestia, OP Labs, Avail, Offchain Labs, Espresso, Scroll, and the Ethereum Foundation. There were absolutely some spicy takes.

If you missed it, you can watch both panels now on our YouTube:

Panel 1 - The Interoperability Challenge

Panel moderated by David Hoffman (Bankless)

Speakers: Felipe Argento (Cartesi), Ben Fisch (Espresso), Daniel Helm (Scroll), Prabal Banerjee (Avail), Ed Felten (Offchain Labs).

Panel 2 - Proof It

Panel moderated by Luca Donnoh (L2beat)

Speakers: Gabriel Coutinho (Cartesi), Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation), Mark Tyneway (Optimism), John Adler (Celestia), Ed Felten (Offchain Labs).

L2con by EpicWeb3 and Zetachain was a busy event for Cartesi where we had the opportunity to speak on three separate occasions:

João kept busy, participating on a panel at the L3 Summit discussing demystifying misconceptions about L3s and also doing a workshop at the dAGIhouse.

We were also stoked to be part of Modular Summit this year, hosted by Celestia and Maven77, where João and Gabriel B. hosted a workshop on Cartesi and Felipe did a presentation on exploring the design tradeoffs of Cartesi and what it means for developers. Finishing off Modular Summit for Cartesi, Erick jumped on the Sovereign Radio podcast hosted by Joeri to talk about Cartesi and all things modular.

And say hello to the gang at EthCC! Despite the craziness and non-stop energy of the week, the team tackled every challenge with a smile. From planning events to jumping on panels, recording a podcast, hosting workshops, networking, and racing around Brussels, they did it all. And a special shoutout to Karmen, who couldn’t make it to Brussels (skill issue tbh), but played an essential role in preparing for the week!

From left to right: Gabriel B, Bruno, Colin, Cynthia, João, Siannie, Carsten, Erick, Felipe, Max, Charles, Brandon, Gabriel C.

Over in Brazil, you could find Cartesians at Blockchain Rio with Bruno doing a presentation on onboarding the next wave of developers with Cartesi. You could also say hi to us at the Modular Crypto meetup we sponsored together with Arbitrum and Axelar. We had Felipe on a panel discussing AI and blockchain and how the Cartesi is a great fit for fully verifiable AI. Check out the recap video here.

Contributoooor Spotlight

This month's contributor highlight goes to Michael for the consistent ‘tool of the week’ posts over on Discord in the channel # beginner-friendly. The Dev Tool Spotlight series, presented by DevAd, showcases an exciting tool every Wednesday, specifically designed to enhance your development experience on Cartesi. Check it out over on our Discord.

Upcoming Events

We're catching our breath after Brussels, but that doesn’t mean we’re not already gearing up for upcoming conferences. Keep posted on where we are and say hi to us when you get the chance by subscribing to our live public events calendar. Also don’t forget to take part in event-related campaigns over on Link3, Galxe, and Zealy!