Cartesi Ecosystem Updates - February 2026

Newsletter/Feb 27, 2026/Marketing Unit

February has flown by in the blink of an eye. Instead of the penguin taking over the feed, we had a monkey this month. Cartesi’s penguin team, however, has been busy, and the project has made steady progress across tech, developer tooling, educational content, and media features. Let’s dive into the past month's highlights.

Tech

Cartesi Rollup Contracts 2.2.0 is out, and while the change looks small on the surface, it carries real weight. This release is now introducing a new function that lets the Rollups node ask the network one simple question: "how many claims have been submitted so far?" That unlocks a "fast-sync" mechanism that dramatically cuts the time a node needs to catch up with the rest of the network. Think of it like skipping to the latest chapter instead of reading the whole book from page one.

On the fraud-proof side, the v2.1.0-alpha.0 pre-release of Dave brings faster and smarter dispute tracking. Instead of replaying every past action to understand where a dispute stands, nodes can now jump straight to the current state. This version also tidies up the architecture by merging different tournament types into one unified framework, making the system cleaner and easier to maintain. An updated Honeypot test suite rounds things out, keeping security testing for permissionless rollups sharp.

The latest Cartesi CLI alpha is also live, and the headline addition is the --fork-url flag, which lets developers pull any live network like Ethereum Mainnet directly into their local testing environment. In practice, that means testing your dApp against real-world smart contracts without ever leaving your local setup. Transactions are faster to send too, and the tool runs more smoothly in automated pipelines overall.

A pull request is also in progress for the Rollups node that extends CLI support to reading PRT dispute data, covering tournaments, commitments, matches, and match advances, bringing it in line with the JSON-RPC API. It also cleans up existing read commands and tightens up how addresses are handled under the hood.

Our monthly tech updates are also featured in L2BEAT's recap. Check out the latest edition here, or browse through previous ones to see how far we've come:

Developer Advocacy

Educational efforts have been front and center this past month, and our developer advocates delivered.

João has dropped a new series on DeFi and why a powerful execution layer like Cartesi matters. DeFi has always punched below its weight, not for lack of ideas, but because execution environments were never built for serious financial computation. Complex math gets simplified, mature libraries disappear, and anything too heavy gets pushed off-chain where users just have to trust. This piece breaks down why that happens, what unlocks when the execution layer expands, and how computation-driven finance opens the door to real risk engines, dynamic prediction markets, and financial logic that finally matches what the models actually demand.

And then, going deeper, he also shipped bite-sized 1-minute videos for everyone to digest at a faster pace. See all the shorts on our YouTube.

Meanwhile, Chinonso put together a demo showing how simple it is to integrate Chainlink Oracles and fetch prices into your Cartesi dApps, plus new libcmt bindings to make life easier for Rust, Python, and Go developers:

Ecosystem

PRT Honeypot v2 is still live and thriving. 50,000 $CTSI are up for grabs for anyone who can crack it, with the pot expected to grow throughout the year. It's the ultimate stress test for Cartesi's fraud-proof system.

For new readers: the Honeypot is a real-world security challenge where participants try to withdraw the pot to their own wallets, directly testing the PRT fraud-proof system under live conditions. The catch? Only the Cartesi Foundation can actually withdraw. It's a community-driven, incentivized audit that doubles as Cartesi's first Stage 2 app, making Cartesi one of only a few projects to have achieved this milestone, as verified on L2BEAT.

Locale Network continued shipping through February. What began as an experimental IoT plus zk-proof infrastructure concept has evolved into a live stack powering real applications, real communities, and real data pipelines.

Under the hood within the Arbitrum ecosystem, deployments are now verified through Cartesi, meaning sensor data is processed in a verifiable way before reaching onchain:

Community

February saw the Lunar New Year festivities as we entered the Year of the Horse. We were proud to celebrate with our regional communities in China and Korea. If you’re in the region and not yet part, be sure to join and connect with our local ambassadors, Sharp and Jay.

To mark the occasion, Galxe included us in a special cohort celebrating the Lunar New Year and rewarding participants. To take part, head here and complete the tasks. Prizes will be distributed starting March 1st.

Across the globe, we loved seeing the creativity in the community and how our strongest supporters continued to bring Cartesi’s story to life through visual art:

And speaking of community, make sure you join our Telegram group to stay in the loop with announcements, lighthearted convos, a few memes, and our custom-trained Plushie AI companion. Haven't chatted with it yet? Jump in and have some fun.

Media

On the media front, Cartesi kept showing up. João Garcia, our Developer Advocate Lead, joined House of Chimera for an X Space, diving into what makes our technology stand out, and we loved witnessing how much the host already knew about Cartesi:

Also, João’s DeFi content series struck a chord with thought leaders on X, who went on to amplify his reflections:

Tech Briefly ran a feature on how Cartesi is making Ethereum rollups safer and more accessible for developers. And we can conclude that the conversation around verifiable computation is showing no signs of slowing down.

That’s a Wrap

These ecosystem updates also land in Cartesians’ inboxes every month, and each edition comes with a giveaway. Newsletter subscribers will get the chance to snag a merch pack with a t-shirt, water bottle, and cap. Subscribe if you haven’t already and keep an eye out for every drop.

February flew by, but Cartesi never slowed down. Tough markets will test us, building will always be the answer. Code shipped, tech evolved, ecosystem news dropped, educational content rolled out, and crypto media took notice. The commitment to bringing complex verifiable computation to the masses never wavers.

Want to start building or just join the community and contribute to the Cartesi ecosystem? Hop on Discord or Telegram to keep the conversation going and support the only Linux-based computation layer… with your favorite penguin leading the way.