Cartesi Ecosystem Recap - September 2023

Newsletter/Oct 3, 2023/KARMEN TRUONG

Tuesday, Oct 3rd – September saw a major milestone moment for the Cartesi ecosystem; Cartesi Rollups launched on Mainnet with its first app-specific rollup DApp, Honeypot!

Setting up a Honeypot for hackers to come and test Cartesi Rollups security not only opens up Cartesi tech to the the wider community, but an unbroken honeypot holding hefty funds boosts the confidence of developers (and users!) in the security of Cartesi's tech, making the Cartesi ecosystem ready to welcome more DApps holding real assets!

To celebrate the launch, core contributors across the Cartesi Ecosystem came together for an X Spaces session to discuss all things Honeypot and what this means for Cartesi. Short on time? No sweat - catch up with the main takeaways in this bite-sized thread. And if you really can’t get enough of Honeypot content, check out the AMA we did with the biggest Web3 subreddits around, r/cryptocurrency and this blog post. For any Mandarin speakers out there, take a look at the AMA hosted by contributors Jacky and Stephen in the Cartesi China community!

Also excited to see the Web3 community joining us in celebrating this milestone. Check some of the features the Honeypot received from different media outlets in the space: The Block, YahooFinance, CoinMarketCap, and CoinDesk to name just a few!

Now that Cartesi has reached a Mainnet Ready stage, developers are able to build DApps with Cartesi Rollups and deploy on Ethereum, Optimism and Arbitrum Mainnets! We’re heading into a new era, everyone!

P.S. Check out the new video created by ecosystem contributor Noir, introducing Cartesi:

If you can’t wait for next month’s recap, don’t forget you have direct access to developments over on Discord - check out the core-units-update channel! But if you’re looking for a quick and easy overview of everything that happened in September, well, here ya go:

Tech

Research & Design

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

On the Hypervisor work front, the team has been hard at work investigating race condition behaviour and implementing a proof-of-concept (PoC) solution. They’ve also reached out to kvmtool maintainers to clarify their perspective on a bug.
In the microarchitecture domain, significant strides have been made in enhancing test coverage for the new uArch reset and renaming machine API methods.
Over in Kernel, Tools, and Toolchain, notable progress has been achieved in forwarding application status, with merged pull requests (PRs) on the Linux, OpenSBI, and tools fronts.

Let’s go on-chain!

Cartesi Rollups Contracts 1.1 underwent some features and upgrades, notably quorum optimization: 40% gas savings in the new version.
Defining main features for Cartesi Rollups Contracts 2.0 - everyone is welcome to check out the weekly taskboard to keep up to date on developments.
🦫Who is Dave? A permissionless fraud-proof system! Check out this thread to get up to date! And if you’re looking to get serious, Dave now has its very own repo - take a look here.

And we’ve got to give a huge congratulations to all ecosystem contributors for their hard work in deploying Honeypot and taking Cartesi Rollups to its mainnet-ready stage 👏.

🚨Alerts in place for any node deployment disruption event. But if you want to keep tabs on the Honeypot yourself, you can follow the activity on the Honeypot smart contract on Etherscan or stay up to date with news via the official Cartesi Twitter.
Rollups Explorer
- The staking explorer received a nice refresh - check it out here.
- New rollups explorer deployed and soon to be integrated into Sunodo.
  - https://cartesiscan.io
  - https://sepolia.cartesiscan.io

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

Finished the machine-interfacing part of Rust NxN, being integrated with the chain-interfacing part.
Made a sample Proof of Concept using Espresso sequencer and writing tx into memory + running a Cartesi Machine with it.
Looking at a 'lambada runner' leveraging proto-dehashing with an IPFS block level focus instead [yield + read + write instead of a dedicated dehashing device]
Discussed Cartesi, Risc0, Linux and the future of expressive computation on blockchains in The Spelunking Podcast #20.

And that’s all but a quick summary of all the work that’s happening in the Cartesi ecosystem! Check out the last live dev recap (held the first Monday of every month) for more:

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.

In progress: releasing the AI NFT minting portion of Ultrachess to Mainnet. Allowing users to define the source code of their bots and mint them as NFTs. This will be separate from the arena rollup.

🎨 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
Staking pool creation update

Cartesi.io Site Development

Front-end enhancements
CMS features development and enhancements

Honeypot Site Development

Web3 integrations

Rolluplab.io Site Maintenance

Projects update
Design updates (in progress)

Sunodo

Branding (in progress)
Prototyping (in progress)

🎮 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

Cartesi Mode Implemented!

Dazzle

Completed a stable build of Cartesi Mode.
Completed new initiative on a PVE boss scaling system prototype spec and internal demo tools, with ongoing work across:
- PVE multiple stages capability - allows us to have the flexibility to have multiple stages.
- Enemy Generator - allows our system to create an enemy to set up the stages we want to create.
- Reward system - allows us to provide different ways of providing rewards to players and test out different game designs.

Follow 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.

Learning experience optimization:

Documentation Portal: Conducted desk research to explore problem areas and to identify important questions, user flow and best practices in the field of other projects. Moreover, defined the scope of work of the documentation optimization.
Planned on-site research and measurement for docs.cartesi.io.

Event study:

Created a large-scale survey to be sent to ETHGlobal NY's participants.
Created a Multiplier’s event survey to learn more about participants and how to optimize the event experience.

Community

Creating your first Cartesi DApp can seem intimidating at first. Luckily, one awesome community member has just the right read for you! Check out Eric’s blogpost on creating your first Cartesi DApp.

It’s always great to see more and more people contributing to the Cartesi ecosystem - if you’re looking for ways to get involved, here are some new DevAdvocacy initiatives you can get stuck into:

💬Earn cool badges for your contributions over in Discord! We've defined 6 roles for our community-facing channels, come check out the cool tags that contributors will be assigned, and see if you can rank among the top 3 most active members! P.S. You don’t have to be a developer to take part 😉.
🗝️Boundless Builders Quest - Showcase your Cartesi DApp or Developer Tooling over in our Discord's 'spotlight' channel and receive a commemorative NFT. Plus, you’ll also get a Boundless Builder Discord badge to help you stand out from the crowd!

Contributor Spotlight

Let’s shout out the hacking team Zach, Felipe, Danilo, and Eduardo, who made it to ETHGlobal New York’s finalist selection with Doom Arena, a distributed DApp for managing and creating contests around the DOOM games. Not only did they make it to the top 13 finalists of the hackathon, they also took first place in ApeCoin DAO’s track for Best Integration and placed 3rd in WalletConnect’s track for Most Innovative Project!

Catch them on the ETHGlobal stage, presenting their winning project to 1400 hackers:

Community Grants Program

Good news all around for the Community Grants Program! The RFP for Complex Vouchers has been completed! The code has been integrated with the Cartesi codebase; review it over on GitHub.

A Solidity library that extends the expressiveness of the Cartesi voucher system is important for the development of Cartesi DApps. 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. Huge thanks to Felipe Bizzo for their contribution! 🥳

And that’s not all! To address challenges faced by proposers in the current process, the CGP has undergone a revamp. A Grants Council of four members has been established with a goal to enhance the efficiency and consistency of the application process for proposers. Leading the new changes is Cartesi’s new grants steward, Hellen! Take a look at her post on the Governance forum to learn more about the new Grants Council and procedures.

For development updates from projects funded through the Community Grants Program,

⚙️Cartenix, 🔢 Drand for Cartesi, 🖼️ Decentralized Painting Canvas and🚰 BlockOasis, head on over to the ecosystem-updates channel over on Discord.

Events

As always, it’s been a busy month packed with events around the world! Online, Matt, co-founder and former president of Boiler Blockchain (Purdue University's hub for blockchain innovation) hosted an intro to Cartesi webinar, DevAdvocacy’s Jathin, Gabriel, and Shaheen shared how Cartesi empowers Web3 dev onboarding in an X Spaces session with LearnWeb3DAO and Max over at Ecosystem Growth made the case for why you should embrace Web3 scalability with Web3 BD, Fuel, Altlayer, Polygon and Metis.

In person, Korean Ambassador Jay had a blast networking and sharing about Cartesi during Korea Blockchain Week, Bruno, Jesse, Zach and Arthur helped mentor students at another Cartesi-sponsored hackathon, HackSMU. And last but definitely not least, let’s not forget ETHGlobal New York! Filled to the brim with events and activities, to recap in justice, Marketing contributor Siannie rounded it all up in its very own blog post - take a read!

Upcoming Events

For anyone in the Web3 Turkish community who's getting ready for the upcoming hackathon in Istanbul, Turkish Ambassador Berkay added Turkish subtitles to the previous Cartesi workshop held for ETHGlobal Paris! Check it out here and pop over to the Turkish Telegram community if you have any questions: https://t.me/cartesitr

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!

*Psst.. Did you know you can own a piece of Cartesi history and mint the Honeypot announcement as an NFT straight to your wallet from Link3?