Cartesi: the first operating system on the blockchain
Cartesi calls itself the first OS Blockchain.
OS stands for Operating System and is a well-known acronym primarily used in the names of Apple’s operating systems, such as iOS and MacOS.
Cartesi is based on the open source Linux operating system and blockchain. In this way, it allows developers to create decentralized logic with Linux and standard programming environments, while preserving the decentralization and security of the blockchain.
The goal is to go beyond the programming language Solidity for smart contracts on Ethereum, and to be able to code smart contracts with other software tools, libraries and services that developers are already used to working with, and without scalability limitations.
The CTSI token
Cartesi also has its own ERC-20 token on it Ethereum blockchain called CTSI.
It debuted on the crypto markets in April 2020, just after the financial market crash in March of the same year caused by the outbreak of the pandemic.
Until December 2020, the price had rarely exceeded $0.05, but with the start of the last big bull run, it soared.
During 2021, it reached two major peaks, the first in May at over $1.7, and the second in November at just under $1.5.
In other words, in the first five months of 2021 it posted a resounding +3300%although it started in December it began a steep descent.
During 2022, it first fell below $0.3 in early May, then after implosion of the Terra/Luna ecosystem and Celsius bankruptcy it fell as low as $0.14.
With collapse of FTX it also fell below $0.1, although in subsequent weeks it rose again to nearly $0.12.
The current price is thus 93% below last year’s peaks, but it is still more than double the price before the 2021 bull run.
Cartesian operating system
The operating system of Cartesi promises to be scalable, sophisticated, developer friendly, secure, multi-chain and privacy guaranteed.
It wants to be an alternative to Ethereum, and especially Solidity, for developers who want to create smart contracts without having to learn to program in other languages than they already use.
The smart contracts created with this operating system are based on Cartesian convolutions that allow the development of decentralized applications that are much more sophisticated than traditional ones, and impossible at layer 1.
Special, Cartesian Rollups Alpha 0.7.0or the latest version of the Cartesian Digest, was recently published.
The new version also includes a new simple Auction dApp, which is an example that can help developers understand the possibilities that Cartesi technology can be used for.
Cartesi Digest is a modular execution layer that elevates simple smart contracts to decentralized Linux executions. In addition, each dApp has its own high-performance rollup chain, and it is possible to create a whole new class of dApps that cannot currently run on EVM chains.
Ethereum
Recently the founder of Cartesi, Erick de Mouracommented on what needs to be done after Merge to make Ethereum even more scalable.
Indeed, despite the move to Proof-of-Stake, there is still much to be done to maximize Ethereum’s potential while keeping fees low. This path to higher scalability goes straight through rollups and layer 2 solutions.
De Moura pointed out that the scalability problem has two main aspects, namely data and computation. On blockchain, these resources are very limited, and therefore expensive, so mainstream adoption requires orders of magnitude higher for both data and computation.
A solution to this will be the introduction of sharding in the future, but in the meantime it is the rollup projects that are working to improve the computational power of smart contracts by enables the processing of a greater volume of transactions.
According to de Moura, most transactions in the future will actually take place exactly on the rollup layers running on top of layer 1, to enable speed and low costs, but with the strong security guarantee of Ethereum.
To be precise, rollups allow all transactional data to be compressed by performing off-chain calculations from a separate network, greatly reducing data usage on the blockchain by virtually eliminating all computational load as well.
But to prevent rollups from also becoming more expensive over time if used by many people, the solution proposed by de Moura and Cartesi is not to force different applications to share the same rollup chain. In fact, as more and more applications share the same virtual machine, they create slowdowns or real congestion, while using application-specific digests avoids the problem altogether.
