Cartesi Ecosystem Updates #10, 2025

Newsletter/Oct 31, 2025/Marketing Unit

October was a month of technical refinement, educational impact, and increased contributor engagement both online and in real life for Cartesi. Rollups Contracts v2.1.0-alpha.1 went live, the PRT fraud-proof system saw key upgrades, and new developer tools aim to make it easier than ever to test complex decentralized applications. Across media, events, and academic initiatives, contributors amplified Cartesi’s presence, showing how our technology is pushing Ethereum rollups forward, expanding what’s possible with expressive design capabilities, and enabling real-world verifiable computation onchain. Let’s dive into the highlights.

Tech

Cartesi Rollups Contracts v2.1.0-alpha.1 has been shipped this month, with a focus on improving the reference node. The release introduces new view functions that allow the node to sync its state faster, including fetching the number of executed outputs and accepted claims on the Application and Consensus interfaces. A few dependencies were also updated, helping keep the system aligned with best practices. Developers can explore the full release here.

The PRT fraud-proof system made significant progress with the implementation of the bond design, now merged into the main branch. This mechanism greatly reduces the delay that a well-funded attacker could impose, dropping potential delays from 106 weeks down to 22, while keeping validation costs minimal for honest participants.

Bonds make claims modestly expensive to deter Sybil and delay attacks, while still fairly redistributing slashed bonds from dishonest actors. The system also now supports applications using the revert feature of the Cartesi Machine, enabling more realistic testing scenarios. These improvements will be exercised in the upcoming Honeypot release for further testing under adversarial conditions.

Speaking of which, as previously announced, the PRT Honeypot revealed a bug that triggered the app to enter a failed state. A post-mortem report confirmed that a liveness bug in the dispute game caused the application to freeze, locking roughly $1,000 (20,042 CTSI tokens) in Cartesi-owned funds.

The root cause was an implementation-specific bug in the PRT smart contracts, not an algorithmic flaw in the fraud-proof system. While no unauthorized withdrawals or incorrect settlements occurred, the incident underlines the importance of honeypot testing for identifying vulnerabilities before real-world deployment. Read more:

If you want to follow the R&D discussions closely, jump on our Discord where all coordination happens in public.

Developer Tooling

Developer tooling advanced with the release of Cartesi Machine Guest Tools v0.17.2, providing essential tooling for the RISC-V Linux OS, including a RISC-V Debian package and a root filesystem for Ubuntu 24.04. This update fixes a non-determinism issue during installation and improves request handling for applications without outputs. A pre-release of Honeypot v3.0.0-rc1 incorporating these changes has also been tagged for continued testing.

Content creation for developers remained a priority and the DevAdvocacy unit continued their mission. Contributor Chinonso released the third video in the PRT explainer series, breaking down dispute resolution step by step and helping developers visualize how fraud-proof mechanics prevent dishonest validators from manipulating valid proofs, ensuring computation integrity even when participants act maliciously

Alongside this, the ongoing PRT visualization tool is in testing, giving developers and validators to monitor both past and ongoing disputes, understand how claims and counterclaims progress, and gain insight into the overall health of the system. Check out a sneak peek with synthetic data here.

Ecosystem

Brazil remains a hub for Cartesi adoption and academic initiatives. Prof. Antonio Rocha from UFF continues to lead this month's hands-on “Web3, Blockchain, and Cartesi Rollups” course at UFBA, while also wrapping up the previous cohort enabled through the national institutions RNP and ESR, providing feedback on students’ final projects showcasing practical use cases.

One proposal has been a stack for energy management, featuring a decentralized application for managing energy credits. Households or businesses with microgeneration, such as solar panels, receive utility tokens called “Eletrocoins” for surplus energy. These tokens can be used to offset energy bills or exchanged for authorized services, like charging an electric car or renting an e-bike. Built on Cartesi Rollups, the system provides a scalable, secure, and transparent way to track and manage energy credits, enabling decentralized and flexible use of renewable energy. Read more about this idea here if you speak Portuguese.

Moreover, in this month’s course organized by Tomorrow at UFBA, the drive to solve real-world problems continued to engage students, and another compelling use case emerged: The EpiScope dApp, a decentralized application developed on Cartesi Rollups to process and analyze arbovirus diagnostics in a verifiable, transparent, and secure manner. Written in Python, the backend collects and processes data using a custom machine learning model, executing inside the Cartesi Machine Linux environment.

User data is processed and analyzed transparently via smart contracts. By leveraging Cartesi’s Rollups framework, computations are performed off-chain for efficiency and cost savings, with only consolidated results returned onchain, demonstrating a scalable and trustworthy approach to healthcare data management. Head over to LinkedIn to dive in here.

Another interesting blockchain-based use case developed by students is managing blood donations through a token system, improving traceability, transparency, and decentralization while also providing incentives for donors. By representing each donation with a token, the system can track donations more reliably, encourage repeat participation, and ensure the entire process is secure and verifiable on the blockchain. Again, the Portuguese-speaking audience can explore more about the project here.

RIVES, the Cartesi-powered retro gaming console providing a playful demonstration of Cartesi’s capabilities in real applications, is gearing up to launch their Base MiniApp, according to their team. For those who don’t know about it yet, RIVES (RISC-V Verifiable Entertainment System) is an onchain fantasy console built on Cartesi that allows users to create, collect, and play small games and software known as "cartridges" within a permissionless ecosystem.

By utilizing the Cartesi Machine and its verifiable computation layer, RIVES ensures that all game logic and execution are deterministic and provably correct, enabling verifiable gameplay where users can truly own and immortalize their gaming history on the blockchain. It serves as a prime example of how Cartesi enables complex, real-world Linux-powered software, like the classic game Doom, to run securely and trustlessly onchain. Keep an eye on their X account for any news, and get ready to play in upcoming tournaments as teased by their team.

Since joining the Partnership Fund, Cartesi’s updates have been featured in the L2BEAT monthly roundup, highlighting our strengthened fraud-proof system, revamped developer documentation, and ongoing research into non-interactive ZK proofs. Check out the previous edition and stay tuned for October’s edition dropping next:

Events

On the events front, October was another fruitful month for Cartesi. Professor Rocha presented a talk on Web3, Blockchain, and Cartesi Rollups at the invitation of YDUQS for their Science and Technology Week audience, while contributor Cynthia rallied the penguins and represented the ecosystem at the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona:

Looking ahead, Cartesi will co-host a Stage 2 Rollups Booth with L2BEAT at DevConnect’s L2District, spotlighting what achieving Stage 2 status means for developers and users, and fostering conversations on decentralization and security across Ethereum. If you are heading to the event in Argentina, feel free to reach out so we can make sure you get to meet and connect with our Cartesians in real life.

Community & Media

Community creativity continues to flourish, with Cartesi-themed art and animations shared by our ambassador Bubbalexone, as well as Farcaster users drawing inspiration from our branding visuals to create their own animated versions. And as always, Tux the penguin has been hard at work and well represented:

Contributors appeared across media and X Spaces. Our ecosystem growth lead, Bruno Maia, has become a regular on Web3 Global Media, joining not one, not two, but three sessions on AI design and the new paradigm, careers in Web3, and sustainability, or as they put it, survival, in the space.

In the meantime, Carlo Fragni joined ETHGas for a second X Space, as well as Bitcoin Magazine NL for a podcast. Dutch speakers are in for a treat with this article, while everyone else can enjoy the video here:

And to finish the month in style, he also joined the Modular Crypto show to talk about everything you can build in the ecosystem, in a special episode for the Brazilian audience. Catch up here if you missed the livestream.

On the PR front, if you’re curious to browse through all of Cartesi’s media features this year, our PR partner, Market Across, has compiled a coverage book that you can access here. And if you’re a host interested in featuring one of our Cartesians on your show or in an article, feel free to reach out through our channels and we’ll make it happen.

That’s a Wrap

October reinforced Cartesi’s mission to bring complex and verifiable computation onchain while leveraging Web2 progress through its Linux-based virtual machine, alongside continued work on tools, education, and community initiatives.

From alpha releases of Rollups Contracts to the evolution of the PRT fraud-proof system, new dev tooling, final projects from university courses, and global visibility through events and media, the ecosystem continues to grow across technical, academic, and social dimensions.

As November kicks in, we turn our attention to ETHLatam in Brazil, where Cartesi will have not one but two speakers, and to Devconnect in Argentina, where we will proudly represent Stage 2 Rollups alongside L2BEAT at a dedicated booth in the L2District. Keep your eyes peeled on our public events calendar so you don’t miss a thing.

We are excited to connect with the community and fellow participants in person. We invite everyone to stay engaged, follow the latest updates on Discord, X, and Telegram, keep building with Cartesi’s battle-tested stack, and look out for the new release of the PRT Honeypot as well as upcoming initiatives aimed at further strengthening our appchain framework and Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem.