Erick de Moura on Cartesi’s Linux-based developer ecosystem

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have eric demura the founder and ceo of cartesi eric welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here thanks ashton and it's a pleasure to be here with you yeah i'm really excited to dive into cartesi so let's just jump right

0:20into it can you start with a little bit of background on what is cartesi and you know how did you come to found it sure so cartes is a company a blockchain technology company that exists for three years now and it gathers academics and engineers we are working together to solve basic problems in the technical adoption of blockchain technology namely scalability and programmability

0:48of smart contracts great yeah there's a lot of work going into smart contracts right now but there are a lot of issues and problems still and most of the smart contracts are on ethereum and i know that your team has a grand vision for what you're looking to achieve so what is your vision of what smart contracts on ethereum or on the blockchain are going to look like when all is said

1:10and done with cartesi sure so if you trace back in time you remember that the original idea of a theme was to create a sort of world computer so it would allow smart quantities to run on a blockchain in a totally decentralized way the problem is that this computer is a very badly performing computer so it scales very badly it doesn't allow for much computation

1:37for much storage and the fees are very high it became very clear uh last year around june when compounds launches token and then it started to defy mania that became impossible for people to use the blockchain so there are two basic problems that we are solving uh starting from ethereum one is that we allow uh smart contracts to run on a second layer

2:04boosting computation allowing for million-fold computational capabilities and also improving on throughput scalability but we keep the same security guarantees as the underlying blockchain and we do that using uh the roll-ups an implementation of optimistic roll-ups the second thing that sets us apart as a scalability

2:30system is the fact that we develop a vm a virtual machine that allows developers to create smart contracts using mainstream software's texts so if you're a developer instead of using solidity and being constrained by the limits of the evm we give you uh a full virtual machine that runs linux and allows you to run uh mainstream software and use mainstream

2:58components to build those microcontrollers so we believe that to be a massive gain in productivity for developers very interesting eric linux approach is not something that i've seen too often in the blockchain industry and i know there are a lot of developers and languages that you can use already i'm guessing that's part of the reason why off chain linux and does

3:23so first of all why is is the reason for linux because of the interoperability with different languages and connecting to different blockchains and what are the main advantages besides some of these other platforms that are doing layer 2 solutions but they're for ethereum but they're not using linux yeah so the other platforms are usually trying to scale

3:46ethereum but they keep using the epm or edm-like environments and porting solid physicals but solidity was a language that was created for this purpose and there is a whole system that needs to mature around so it's the tooling and everything if you look at linux linux is a is an operating system that has been evolving for decades and we have

4:14thousands and thousands of of software components libraries services frameworks languages that were developed on top of linux the last 30 years or more so imagine that you as a developer of a smart contract you can count on this vast array of components to develop your logic so it really allows for a vast limit of possibilities when you program your

4:39smart contract and you mentioned when the birth of compound came out last year there was an explosion and decentralized finance and defy primarily being on ethereum and that's where we saw those scalability issues can you talk about cartesi solution with respect directly to the decentralized finance industry because there were some other issues you know with ethereum that's

5:02been known to have scaling issues before d5 came out and then when d5 came out all of a sudden it exploded and the transaction costs were through the roof but decentralized finance continues to grow so how is cartesi getting involved with decentralized finance and solving the issues within that industry absolutely uh i would say it starts from the fact that we are

5:25implementing optimistic roll-ups so roll-ups is uh is a technique for layer 2 scalability that has been proposed by people related to the ethereum foundation and also being a preferred kind of layer to solution other solutions like like side chains and plasma they have some kind of deficiencies and roll ups allows for

5:50applications to guarantee data availability which is essential for security especially in the five applications when you have a lot of money involved that you have to secure well your application so in that sense we are implementing roll-ups so we just like other projects implementing role apps we are going to allow for scalable defined applications but

6:16because we also support linux these define developers they will be able to develop much more elaborate and complex defile logic using characters and you mentioned that one of the main differences with cartesia is that the underlying security is although it has the scalability and throughput the underlying security is going to be the same as ethereum now

6:41compared to some of the other platforms that are using side chains and plasma as you talked about you're using off chain and to me that sounds like oh it's not you know when you're first creating applications it's not decentralized or it's on a centralized server um it is that true and can you just re-talk about the security part in terms of the security advantages

7:04on cartesi compared to just on ethereum dapps that are on the network right sure so again in the in the roll apps design especially in the optimistic prolapse design uh instead of having the ethereum validators validating the computation and transactions you have a set of validator nodes working on layer two so these validator nodes they can

7:32uh make the computation uh off chain and what they do is that they they usually uh work on a small set of applications for a single application instead of all the applications in the universe like ethereum does so that's where they scale well and it's secure because in optimistic roll-ups one of these off-chain validators just do just does the entire computation

8:00and proposes a result back on the blockchain and then uh all the other validators and people involved this is and they hope that solution is correct but they have a chance to verify if the competition is accurate and correct and if it's not they have a a long enough time period to challenge the decline and prove to the blockchain that that was wrong in first place so

8:27uh optimistic role apps they don't rely immediately on the full security of the blockchain only when it's needed so that's why it scales very well while preserving the security of the underlying blockchain okay great now i understand the economics a little bit better and to add to that can you talk about the cartesi token how that fits into the cartesi ecosystem

8:50if the developers are interacting with it and does it create a sustainable ecosystem sure so there are a few different use schedules for the cartesian token curtas is developing roll-ups on one side and also a side chain to scale data for decentralized applications so we have these two products that are running in parallel so the role apps scale transactions and computation the

9:17side chain scales data the great innovation about the side chain is that it is a side chain for temporary data if you look at regular blocks chains they store data forever so it's very expensive in fact to keep data in the blockchain forever we're designing a side chain in which applications will be uh able to define a window of time in which the data

9:42needs to be preserved and then they are just deleted so that will allow also for great data scalability uh for the for cartesia applications as a whole so in the sidechain the character token works just like uh ethereum would work for a blockchain it's used as a crypto fuel for users to insert transactions and for validators to receive rewards for performing their job

10:08so that's the main utility of the category token the other one is that ukrainian marketplace for uh validators that are using the roll apps infrastructure so uh validators will be able to set their prices and the users will be able to pay or or or requests whatever they want to pay for the services as well so all this marketplace is going to be working on cartesian

10:36that's that's interesting i did not know about that sidechain and the marketplace as well and so you mentioned that the platform has been running for three years now are all three of those already in production and in you know in the like they're already working uh in 2020 uh we developed the first piece of the technology and released a first usable sdk so it was a

11:01computational oracle that allows smart quantities to define complex computational jobs that are performed of chain and return to the blockchain right now we are working on the implementation of optimistic prolapse uh we intend to get test nets by q2 and we are also developing parallel the sidechain so also the first part of the sidechain has already been

11:27completed in this december we released the proof of stake system that we already have lots of people participating in and that is the foundation for the sidechain the complete sidechain will take a while and we are going to announce other releases along this year well well it sounds like 2021 is going to be an exciting year for you and your team it is very

11:48exciting yeah what what do you think will be one of the major key success factors to you know getting all of this out and then having it have rapid adoption throughout 2021 we are trying whatever we can to first make make people aware of the breakthrough that cortez is breaking to the industry right we are studying a new standard for people to develop

12:14smart quantities that believe to be much more powerful so we are going to be working closely with developers with other blockchain projects with defy startups with gaming startups as well and from times two times we're gonna from time to time we're gonna deploy some kind of uh insensitive program last year for instance we uh we ran a grant program a cartes incubation the app program

12:45and we have three projects now developing their applications using the first version of our tech and this is the kind of uh of the mechanism that they're going to be using going forward to bring people into our platform and then they will see that they can do amazing things and they just spread the word as well well it sounds great now if there are other developers or d5 projects or

13:12stakers or just community members that are looking to get involved with cartesi what's the best way to learn more and to get into the community so we have um different channels through which people can get in contact with us uh we are always willing to engage in technical conversations with people for that we have an exclusive discord channel we also have several telegram

13:39communities an international one and also other regional communities in different countries and we are definitely open to hear whatever people want to bring uh suggestions and questions and we're ready to engage great eric well i will leave all of those links in the description box below for the viewers all the best with cartesi in 2021 it sounds like your team has a lot

14:06on the table and i'm excited to follow along so let's follow up in the near future thanks ashton you