Cartesi Ecosystem Recap - August 2023

Newsletter/Sep 11, 2023/Karmen Truong

Absolutely brilliant turnout for the first live Monthly Dev Recap call! Thank you to everyone who tuned in and for all the questions asked - it led to a great discussion! If you missed it, catch the replay here:

And if you’re looking for a quick overview, core contributor Claudio Silva has put together this handy summary of development highlights from August - check it out:

Tech

Research & Design

The Cartesi Machine, which is the heart of Cartesi Rollups and Cartesi Compute products, had the following updates:

A lot of good news on the Hypervisor work front:
- Completed the hypervisor registers aliasing logic.
- Fixed an issue with invalid shifts by 1 occurring in hip.
- Conducted benchmarking on the hypervisor, revealing a current 3x slowdown in comparison to the emulator for CPU-bound tasks.
- Investigated and addressed the segmentation fault bug occurring during the fasta benchmark execution.
Machine Emulator SDK 0.16.2 is out! All changes are listed here.
Did you try the Cartesi Machine running on a web browser? Check it out here!

Cartesi Rollups V1.0 Beta is currently in the final testing stage!

Official documentation on docs.cartesi.io is being updated.

There are also improvements in the tools for increasing the developers' experience when developing with Cartesi Rollups:

Sunodo's MVP has just launched version 0.8. The main feature is a new --no-backend option for Sunodo run, which allows running the application on the host before dealing with the cartesi machine. Documentation at https://docs.sunodo.io/guide/running/running-application#no-backend-mode.
Rollups explorer
- Already upgraded to Cartesi Rollups 1.0.0.
- Dropped goerli support, sepolia was adopted.
- Dropped Subgraph support, Subsquid was adopted.

Cartesi Compute unit had significant progress and did mind-blowing experiments:

Compute basics + NxN in Rust (reusable in other Cartesi ecosystem products) & also up to date with the Lua prototype
Reproducible apt-get + Rust builds (for ZK ELF binaries and building Compute itself) using CM
SONRPC Cartesi Machine binding for Rust up to date to Machine Emulator 0.15.2
Presented “Linux in ZK” (using Cartesi + RiscZero) at zkWarsaw.
Participate in discussions regarding experimentation on Cartesi and Espresso Sequencer + paving the way for the Cartesi ecosystem to use it (legal, etc.). A dehashing device, or even a de-KZG’ing device, will probably be needed.

Catch the research meeting on Sequencers, Espresso design, HotShot L2 & L1, and much more:

Work on future versions for Cartesi Rollups has already started and Cartesi’s fraud proof system is also under development. To keep this overview short, catch the rest in the last live dev recap here.

Got questions? Ask your questions to core developers and researchers directly on Discord!

Ecosystem Updates

♟️ Ultrachess

Ultrachess is a fully on-chain chess application developed with Cartesi Rollups, allowing users to put real value on the line and play chess with more than just their Elo at stake.

Development ongoing.

🎨 Productive

Productive is a Software Development house specialising in web & mobile development projects, with a grant to provide design, development, update, and maintenance for Cartesi ecosystem websites.

Cartesi Explorer Front-End

New Branding Implementation

Cartesi.io Site Development

Front-end enhancements
CMS features development and enhancements

Honeypot Site development

Front-end development
CMS implementation

🎮 Aetheras

Aetheras is a blockchain company with experience in and a deep understanding of game development, with a grant to develop Texas HODL’em Poker and Dazzle (match-3 strategy game).

Texas HODL’em Poker

Frontend implementation completed
Cartesi Mode implementation in-progress

Dazzle

General game fixes completed
- Bug Fix & Code Refactor
- Error handling
Tutorial Completed
Built-in Wallet for Cartesi Mode Completed

In-progress

New Initiative: PVE boss scaling system - The boss becomes stronger every time you fight against it.
Cartesi Mode
- Testing feature
Built-in wallet for Cartesi Mode
- Frontend implementation

Follow Dazzle updates on their Twitter, join their Discord community or test out the game for yourself here!

🧠 UXBoost

UXBoost is working on comprehensive user research and service flow study for Cartesi's hacker/developer’s experience, including awareness, learning about Cartesi tech, hacking experience and grant applications. UXBoost aims to gain insights, identify improvement areas and devise strategies to enhance the overall user experience.

Experience research:

Completed the research report, including insights and generated inspirations to apply to the service design.
Completed six user interviews of ETHGlobal Paris hacker’s experience.
Supported marketing research.
Planning on a mixed-method research approach for long-term data collection.

Service design - backstage analysis & management

Based on the research insights, we created an event task board template to organize the event organization workstream.
Ecosystem units sync up meetings to align and manage the research plan and organize backstage tasks.

Explorer

Worked on light mode
Supported front-end development

Community

Over in DevAdvocacy, core contributor Shaheen’s been hard at work making improvements to enhance your experience and engagement within our ever-growing Discord Community Server. Here's a quick rundown of what's new:

💪We now have a dedicated category for developer support! So whether you have questions on Cartesi Rollups, the Cartesi Machine or language-specific support, you can easily find
✨ Builder-Spotlight channel - We welcome all developers to add their projects here, engage with the community and inspire others. This is your place to show and tell, so go ahead and post what you’ve created or what you’re working on using Cartesi!
🤖 Statbot - Interested to know how active you've been in the community? Go to the ☕┃cafeteria channel and hit the /me command to see your chart. P.S. Check out the /top command to see who’s most active in the community overall.

These updates are a part of the broader builder-community initiatives. Stay tuned for more in the coming days!

Builder Spotlight

Speaking of builder spotlights, check out this amazing weekend creation from core contributor Eduardo Barthel:

Imagine testing the Cartesi Machine effortlessly, experiencing its incredible capabilities for developing DApps in your web browser without installing anything. Eduardo’s project allows you to interact with the Cartesi Virtual Machine and experiment with shell commands, making it a valuable resource for learning Linux commands!

Moreover, you'll find Python and Lua languages readily available in the terminal, allowing you to run Python scripts directly in your browser. This project is a brilliant example of integrating the Cartesi Machine into a web frontend application, opening up exciting possibilities for DApps that require deterministic computation or even running a complete Linux operating system within a web frontend. It's user-friendly, accessible, and a fantastic way to dive into the world of Cartesi. Intrigued? Burning with questions? Eduardo opened the conversation with Cartesi Redditors - take a look and join in over on r/cartesi!

Community Grants Program

Proposals are still coming in strong over on the Cartesi Discourse forum! Make sure to check them out and leave your feedback on how the proposal could be improved, or show some love if you think it’s already in great shape.

Got an idea for what to build using Cartesi tech? Why wait? Check the guidelines on writing your proposal and submit! P.S. If you have an amazing idea but no time to build, throw it out to the wider community in our Blue Sky Ideas and Feedback section. Who knows, there might be a builder out there who could bring it to life!

Not a developer? Sharing your feedback, whether that’s in the Governance forum or by voting on Snapshot, is where the magic of a thriving Cartesi ecosystem comes together, so don’t be afraid to jump in and take part! If you want to shape the Cartesi ecosystem by voting, make sure you’re ready by staking your CTSI before the next vote opens.

CGP Funded Proposals

Development updates from projects funded through the Community Grants Program:

🔢 Drand for Cartesi

Random numbers play a vital role in numerous applications and DApps, especially games. Think about how to pick a number from 1-10 in a trustless way 🤔… well, with great difficulty!

This proposal is a component of a larger set of tools for generating random numbers on Cartesi’s convenience layer, which in turn can help increase Cartesi’s adoption and community growth.

Monorepo https://github.com/Calindra/cartesi-drand/

First Milestone presented! 🎉

An automated build and test process using GitHub Actions
The entire codebase under a permissive MIT open-source license
A convenience middleware (Rust HTTP API, compiled releases)
Drand Provider (Node JS Package)
An example of a simple game (Blackjack)

🎫 Complex Vouchers

A Solidity library that extends the expressiveness of the Cartesi voucher system. Providing this level of flexibility opens up the possibility of expanding the behaviour of vouchers to support more complex interactions by targeting smart contracts that extend their functionalities. Learn more about the need for complex vouchers here in the original RFP!

Developments:

Tests are 90% done, and PR creation is underway.

🖼️ Decentralized Painting Canvas

A playground DApp to showcase the value proposition of Cartesi Rollups as an execution layer.

The goal of the Decentralized Painting Canvas is to demonstrate the ability to have a decentralised use of open software components/libraries like Fabric.js. All states of the collective canvas will be submitted to the blockchain. In addition, the back-end application will generate snapshot images (PNG/JPG) of each state of the collective drawing (everyone’s contributions) and save them as NFTs.

Developments:

Researching and implementation of rollups vouchers

🚰 BlockOasis

A proof of concept for a smart water management system using IoT devices and blockchain technology. Note: This project was funded via the now deprecated CGP Rapid Grants path.

Completed the Software for Stakeholder Computers - data retrieval and verification.This system retrieves data from the blockchain, which contains the timestamp and CID of the data stored on IPFS and performs the verification test on it. This verified data will then go forward for further computations.
Data Flow diagrams were added for better understanding.

Events

This month in events, Shaheen and Jathin from DevAdvocacy connected with the builders and Web3 enthusiasts at Web3Conf India - India's first chain-agnostic Web3 conference. Meanwhile, over in Ukraine, Cartesi ambassador Mykhailo attended a technical workshop in Lviv, promoting Cartesi tech and establishing connections within the local developer community! And what could be crazier than running the EVM in ZK? Core contributor Carsten gave a lightning talk on running Linux in ZK at zkWarsaw (click to check out the slides)!

We also wrapped up the first Cartesi builders challenge handcrafted for the Inteli blockchain team! Designed to bring the Inteli group closer to the Cartesi tech stack and build a rapport between both groups, the challenge was to create a more sophisticated auction system for the Web3 ecosystem, using the Cartesi Rollups auction example as a base to build their application. Let’s give a round of applause to the winners:

Plus, we saw the biggest GBCC yet! Over 80 of you tuned in to hear OG game dev, @guiltygyoza chat infinite games as well as define on-chain reality from zero to one. Huge shoutout also to Ecosystem Growth contributor Max Hatesuer for consistently bringing on amazing guests and hosting the session! Missed out? Catch up with the replay:

Upcoming Events

And that’s just a glimpse of the events we have coming up! Stay in the loop and never miss a beat with Cartesi's exciting lineup of events - subscribe to our supercharged public events calendar, and take part in event-related campaigns over on Link3 and Galxe!