Cartesi Ecosystem Recap - July 2023

Newsletter/Aug 10, 2023/Karmen Truong

Rebranding

We’re opening the doors to a new era with a rejuvenation of the Cartesi branding. Together with Web3 Marketing agency Noir, we unveiled it all in a community call in July and were over the moon at seeing over 350 Cartesians come to celebrate the new branding with us!

As you’ve seen, Cartesi has been evolving in many ways, and there’s been a growing consensus across contributors, builders and community members for a new brand identity that better represents the current vision and values of the Cartesi ecosystem.

This refreshed identity embodies openness, decentralisation and experimentation, nurturing developers keen to explore the world of Web3. The new concept repositions Cartesi as a fresh space for limitless exploration, with the imagery built along themes we explored with Noir in the strategy process - the idea of exploring and building in a new frontier. The updated bright, bold brand colour unifies the brand alongside the vibrant illustration style.

Cartesi is opening up opportunities at the limits of Web3, allowing novel, emerging technologies to flourish and impossible ideas to be brought to life. With this rebrand, we’re looking forward to attracting meaningful contributions from current and new developers, especially given the new wave of interest surrounding app-specific rollups!

Tech

Research & Design

Enjoying the increased frequency of core-units-updates over on Discord? Or finding it a bit hard to keep track? 😵‍💫If you’re in the latter camp, don’t worry! Core contributor Claudio Silva has put together this handy summary of development highlights from July - check it out:

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

There were a lot of improvements in the microarchitecture (UARCH):
- Added proofs to the json logs for consumption by the Solidity step tests.
- Fixed inconsistent merkle tree bug when steps alternate with and without proofs
- Optimized proof collection in access logs by skipping superfluous tree updates
- Implemented a build step to validate the uarch instruction set generated by the toolchain and facilitate testing other toolchains.
- Started refactoring reset_uarch_state() to be portable to Solidity
- Embedded uarch-ram-bin in the emulator executable (WIP)
- Refactoring access log to allow for optional data (WIP)
Also, many improvements on the machine emulator:
- Automated the device tree building into the machine's ROM, eliminating the need for the machine-emulator-rom repository.
- Renamed ROM to DTB while moving it to a new, more roomy physical memory range
- Initialized Linux random entropy from the device tree on boot, removing the need for the rndaddentropy tool on init.
- Added init and entry point configs to machine ROM.
- Introduced new init and entry point append options to cartesi-machine.lua.
- Replaced MTD flash drives with PMEM (persistent memory) drives.
- Added a way to disable flash drive auto-mounting in init.
- Added a new command-line option to change ownership of flash drive devices in init
- Refactored, optimized, and simplified the state hash verification code in Lua tests
- Refactored the way PMAs are listed in Lua tests, making the test suite more flexible for PMA changes
The Hypervisor implementation continues in progress, and some fixes were needed.

The Cartesi Rollups V1.0 Beta development stage is finished, and the internal test stage has started!

Initial documentation for the Cartesi Rollups node is already available. This documentation includes the README file and the description of the node architecture. Check it here: https://github.com/cartesi/rollups/tree/main/offchain
Sunodo's MVP has been completed with version 0.6, and it will offer a great dev experience to build a DApp using the Cartesi Rollups framework and run it locally.

Cartesi Compute also had significant progress:

Input and study on the Cartesi Compute’s developer experience.
Study on how to bring NxN arbitration to Compute, making the implementation more explainable and auditable.
Research on Cartesi Compute secured by EigenLayer. Check out the talk:

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.

Demo-ed existing and new Ultrachess features at AW_House in Paris.
Prototyped chess engine source code attribution by uploading chess engine source code through git and compiling them within the Cartesi Machine.

🎨 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

Bump dependencies for Utils package
Bump dependencies for UI package
Bump dependencies on explorer root-project
Update storybook packages to the latest compatible version.

Cartesi.io Website Development

CMS implementation completed
UI tweaks
Initial content loading and updates
CMS new features
Website new features

Cartesi Documentation Site Rebranding

Updated UI to match the new Cartesi Foundation site

Governance Site Rebranding

Updated UI to match the new Cartesi Foundation site

🎮 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 (ongoing)

P.S. Here’s a preview of the Poker design wireframes:

Dazzle

Tournament (Cartesi) Mode
- Bug Fixes & Code Refactor: Error handling
- Testing feature underway
Tutorial Flow & Gameplay
- Worked on UI/UX Design
- Frontend & Backend implementation
Built-in Wallet for Cartesi Mode (ongoing)
- UI/UX Flow & Revamp
- Frontend implementation (ongoing)

Follow weekly Dazzle updates on their Twitter or join their Discord community!

🧠 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 7 research interviews and now working on data analysis.
Planned and prepared the hackers' experience research on ETHGlobal Paris.
Organized and planned Cartesi DevAdvocacy experience research and data collection strategy for Q3 & Q4.

Service Design - backstage analysis & management

Structured the dashboard, index for backstage documents and discussions to track the performance.
Designed ideation workshops to facilitate the discussion among units.

Community

The final unlock of the CTSI foundation reserve was on July 23rd, 2023!

But that doesn’t mean the end of transparency reports! They’re getting a revamp - expect new, adapted reports aligned with Cartesi’s blossoming decentralized ecosystem. Read the latest report:

https://cartesi.io/blog/ctsi-foundation-reserve-transparency-report-july-2023/

Community Grants Program

Congratulations to Cartenix for successfully passing the community vote on Snapshot with 100% consensus to fund! 🔥Why is this important? By putting NIX inside a Cartesi Machine, you can generate a verifiable, deterministic, and reproducible binary and hash. Having these verifiable records live immutably on-chain provides a much higher level of security and trustlessness. Core contributor Max wrote a great explainer. Check it out:

Got an idea for what to build using Cartesi tech? Why wait? Check the guidelines on writing your proposal and submit!

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/

Drand-Provider:
- Listener to inspect the random request from Middleware;
- Drand client to read the beacon from Drand network;
- InputSender to submit the Drand's beacon to the Middleware;
- GitHub Actions - CI
Middleware:
- Drand's beacon validation BLS;
- Input buffer
- Forward beacon rule to verify the beacon's time against input's time
- GitHub Actions - CI
- Endpoint to provide the randomness

🎫 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:

Ordered vouchers, future vouchers, paid vouchers, expirable vouchers
Atomic vouchers built as a standard voucher to compose any complex voucher combination
Currently creating all the tests in the Cartesi environment

🖼️ 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:

Storing user generated Images as NFTs
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. For funding requests which fall outside of the CGP, you can apply here.

Architecture of Distributed System
Built the data flow diagram for the stakeholder validator and aggregator nodes.
IoT Data Simulator
This tool contains a system for sending and listening to data using MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol. MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol designed for IoT (Internet of Things) applications.

Completed the software for Stakeholder AggregatorThis implements an MQTT data handling system that saves received data into chunks. It connects to an MQTT broker, processes incoming messages, and uploads the data to IPFS. The IPFS Content Identifiers (CIDs) are then stored on an Ethereum smart contract.

Events

Brazil-based core contributors showed up in full force for a Web3 meet-up with Codigo Brazuca in Rio de Janeiro! On the other side of the world, contributors Cynthia and Daniel teamed up with W3B Lab Madrid & Barcelona, hosting a meet-up to connect with the Spanish community, not to mention attending ETHBarcelona itself, hacking and providing mentorship to builders!

For the monthly Game Builder Community Call over on the Cartesi Discord, we were joined by David Amor, Playmint CEO! Max probed his thoughts on Web3 gaming, building on-chain games and opened the floor to your questions. Catch the replay:

Then we were off to Paris! Bruno hit up the Modular Summit before meeting up with other Cartesi Contributors for ETHCC, wrapping up his key takeaways in a bite-sized thread - check it out! A special shoutout also to Mathias, a core member of the Kryptosphere community, who played a significant role in organising two events leading up to ETH Paris! Huge kudos for his commitment and full ownership of the initiative - super excited to keep collaborating together to reach different universities in France.

For a full recap of all the activities around ETHCC and ETHGlobal Paris, check out core contributor Siannie’s handy recap here!

P.S. Stay in the loop and never miss a beat with Cartesi's exciting lineup of events - subscribe to our supercharged public events calendar!