Read Our New Project Report About Bitcoin (BTC) - The World's Largest Cryptocurrency
Go
Cartesi (CTSI)
A Layer-2 Optimistic Rollups Solution Bringing Mainstream Software to Smart Contracts.
Share this article
Cartesi is a layer-2 infrastructure for blockchains that allows developers to code highly scalable smart contracts with mainstream software stacks on a Linux VM. Cartesi uses a combination of rollups and side-chains.
Mainstream programmability: Developers can create smart contracts and dApps using the mainstream software stack that they are already familiar with. By moving most of the complex logic of their dApps to portable off-chain components, Cartesi empowers developers to select the best run-time environment in which to host each part of their dApps.
Scalability: Cartesi enables million-fold computational scalability, data availability of large files and low transaction costs. All while preserving the strong security guarantees of the underlying blockchain.
Privacy guarantees: Cartesi allows for decentralized games where players conceal their data and Enterprise applications that run on sensitive data, preserving privacy on dApps.
Portability: Cartesi is blockchain-agnostic and will run on top of most chains. The current implementations are supporting Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Matic (Polygon), with Elrond coming soon.
1. What is Cartesi (CTSI)?
Cartesi is solving the urgent problem of scalability and high fees on blockchains by implementing a variant of optimistic roll-ups. Most notably, Cartesi is revolutionizing smart contract programming by allowing developers to code with mainstream software stacks. Noether is Cartesi's side-chain that is optimized for ephemeral data, providing low-cost data availability to dApps.
Cartesi's competitive edge as a layer-2 and optimistic rollups solution is that it allows developers to code their smart contracts and dApps directly with mainstream software components and Linux OS resources. With mainstream programmability, dApp developers have a new expressive power to create more complex and featureful smart contracts. It also opens the doors for the adoption of regular developers who have never programmed for blockchain, and enables them to create decentralized applications with familiar software stacks.
Creepts is a decentralized tower defense game built by Cartesi to showcase an early version of Cartesi's core technology.
2.2 Descartes
Descartes is a decentralized computational oracle for Ethereum. Descartes executes massive computational tasks off-chain, on a Linux virtual machine fully specified by a smart contract. The results of the computations are fully verifiable and enforceable on-chain by honest Descartes node runners, preserving the strong security guarantees of Ethereum.
Descartes is currently live and implemented in several projects:
Creol Environments: An IoT commercial building control system that carbon offsets itself in realtime to be a carbon-neutral building control system. Creol is implementing Cartesi in their IoT devices to ensure that building stats measurements and computations are verifiable and securely inserted on Ethereum. Integrating Cartesi with their hardware is rendering their IoT system more resilient and fraud-proof.
SimThunder: is working to make sim racing more fun and realistic with NFTs and a marketplace. SimThunder is using Cartesi as a way to ensure a marketplace for NFTs while maintaining privacy for items that have been shared. With the Descartes SDK, the SimThunder marketplace allows parties to securely trade NFTs and valuable contents.
Carti: An infrastructure project that aims to bring a packaging technology to life on Cartesi. The objective is to allow developers to have programmatic access to retrieve Cartesi Machines, leading to a better development experience.
2.3 Descartes Rollups
Descartes Rollups is the implementation of Cartesi Rollups, enabling scalable smart contracts built with mainstream software stacks. Descartes Rollups is a variant of optimistic rollups with interactive dispute resolution.
Developers will be able to use countless mainstream software components to code smart contracts that run on a Linux VM. With Descartes, developers solves the scalability limits of Ethereum with million-fold computational gains, while preserving the strong security guarantees of the blockchain.
2.4 Noether
Noether is a high-performance side chain for data availability. It is Cartesi's side chain designed for temporary data availability, allowing dApps to achieve high throughput and storage of large files with reduced fees.
Noether's Proof of Stake system is currently live and running. Users can stake their CTSI and earn mine rewards to participate in Cartesi's growing network of validators.
Noether is currently being bootstrapped through CTSI Reserve Mining. The staking rewards from the CTSI Reserve Mining are funded from the “mine reserve”, which avoids inflation in order to bootstrap the network. Early adopters who run nodes may earn higher staking rewards.
3. Token sales and economics
3.1 Key metrics
Token Name
CTSI
Token Type
ERC-20
Seed Sale Allocation
2.00% of the total token supply
Seed Sale Token Price
0.005 USD
Seed Sale Date
August 1st - 31st, 2017
Amount Raised Seed Sale
100,000 USD
Private Sale Allocation
5.00% of the total token supply
Private Sale Token Price
0.01 USD
Private Sale Date
April 6th - May 21st, 2019
Amount Raised Private Sale
500,000 USD
Strategic Sale Allocation
0.67% of the total token supply
Strategic Sale Token Price
0.03 USD
Strategic Sale Date
December 22nd - 31st, 2019
Amount Raised Strategic Sale
200,000 USD
Launchpad Sale Allocation
10.00% of the total token supply
Launchpad Sale Price
0.015 USD
Launchpad Sale Date
TBD
Amount Raised Launchpad Sale
1,500,000 USD
Current Circulating Supply
192,733,334 CTSI (19.27%)
Total Supply
1,000,000,000 CTSI
3.2 Token supply distribution
Launchpad Sale tokens comprise 10.00% of the total token supply.
Seed Sale tokens comprise 2.00% of the total token supply.
Private Sale tokens comprise 5.00% of the total token supply.
Strategic Sale tokens comprise 0.67% of the total token supply.
Team tokens comprise 15.00% of the total token supply.
Advisors tokens comprise 2.11% of the total token supply.
Foundation Reserve tokens comprise 40.22% of the total token supply.
Mining Reserve tokens comprise 25.00% of the total token supply.
CTSI token distribution (%)
Seed Sale overview
The Seed Sale was conducted from August 1st - 31st, 2017 for 20,000,000 CTSI at a rate of 1 CTSI = 0.005 USD and raised a total of 100,000 USD at 457.82 USD = 1 ETH and 7,030.70 USD = 1 BTC, selling 2.00% of the total token supply. The Seed Sale was conducted in ETH and BTC, raising 172.05 ETH and 3.02 BTC.
Private Sale overview
The Private Sale was conducted from April 6th - May 21st, 2019 for 50,000,000 CTSI at a rate of 1 CTSI = 0.010 USD and raised a total of $500,000 USD at 178.15 USD = 1 ETH, selling 5.00% of the total token supply. The Private Sale was conducted in ETH and USD, raising 561.33 ETH and 400,000 USD.
Strategic Sale overview
The Strategic Sale was conducted from December 22nd - 31st, 2019 for 6,666,668 CTSI at a rate of 1 CTSI = 0.030 USD and raised a total of 200,000 USD, selling 0.67% of the total token supply. The Strategic Sale was conducted in USD.
Launchpad Sale overview
The Launchpad Sale was conducted in April 2020 for a total raise of 1,500,000 USD worth of BNB at 0.015 USD per CTSI token, selling 10.00% of the total token supply. CTSI/BNB exchange rate will be determined prior to the date of sale.
3.3 Token governance and use of funds
The Cartesi team releases regular transparency reports that include details on the foundation unlocks and where the CTSI is spent or allocated for governance purposes. The reports can be viewed via the transparency section on their blog here.
The Cartesi team also plans to introduce token inflation for staking rewards in the future, which is yet to be finalized, and not presented in the following chart. More details on the CTSI macroeconomy article can be reviewed here. CTSI will have no inflation until the mine reserve is completely depleted, which will happen no earlier than 2023.
CTSI token release schedule
3.4 CTSI token overview and use-cases
CTSI is a utility token that functions as a crypto-fuel for Noether:
Stakers receive CTSI rewards by staking their tokens and participating in the network.
Node runners are selected randomly according to a PoS system, and gain the right to create the next block.
Users of the network pay fees in CTSI tokens to insert data on the side-chain.
CTSI also plays a role with Descartes Rollups.
CTSI will be used by dApps to outsource the execution of verifiable and enforceable computation to entities running Descartes nodes.
Read here for the team's documentation on the Cartesi Network and CTSI Token.
4. Project team
Erick de Moura
CEO
Former Software Developer at Arizona Bay, Engineer and Team Lead at WebRadar, Software Designer at WiNGs Telecom.
Diego Nehab
CTO
Associate Professor at IMPA on computer graphics, image processing, and massive parallelism.
Augusto Teixeira
Chief Scientific Officer
Associate Professor at IMPA specializing on probability and graph theory, former Postdoc Researcher at Ecole normale supérieure.
Colin Steil
COO
Former Program Ambassador at Anchor Taiwan, Global Partnership Manager at Mobile Only Accelerator and Chinaaccelerator, co-founder of Canada China Youth Foundation.
Bruno Maia
Head of BD
Former Consultant and Senior Staff Engineer at Qualcomm, Pre-sale director at Bitfury.
Andrea Pizzol
Senior Project Manager
Former System Development Coordinator at IMPA, CTO at Tamboro.
Danilo Tuler
Head of Engineering
Former CTO at Site Blindado, IT Director at B2W Digital, Director at Investtools and Ideais.
Carlo Fragni
Senior Software Engineer
Victor Fusco
Senior Software Engineer
Marcos Pernambuco
Senior Software Engineer
Milton Jonathan
Senior Software Engineer
Stephen Chen
Software Engineer
Fabiana Cecin
Software Engineer
Gabriel Coutinho
Software Engineer
Alexander Bai
Software Engineer
Felipe Argento
Blockchain Engineer
Gabriel Barros
Blockchain Engineer
Pedro Argento
DeFi Researcher
Victor Yves
Software Engineer
Gabriel Ligneul
Senior Software Engineer
Zehui Zheng
Blockchain Engineer
5. Roadmap, updates, and business development
5.1 Original roadmap and achievements
Date
Milestone
Commentary
2020: Q4
Release of Cartesi Explorer and CTSI Reserve Mining on Mainnet
Cartesi has released an updated roadmap for 2021, which can be read in depth here.
2020 was a very significant year for Cartesi. With the release of the Cartesi Machine (Cartesi's VM) and a decentralized computational oracle, the Cartesi team is now focused on implementing Rollups. This will allow for scalable smart contracts, and also enable developers to code smart contracts with mainstream software components on top of a Linux VM. Most of Cartesi's technical effort this year will be toward bringing this implementation to Mainnet.
5.3 Commercial partnerships and business development progress
Recent and significant partnerships include:
Avalanche: Cartesi is integrating its layer-2 infrastructure with Avalanche (AVAX), enabling a Linux environment for smart contracts and higher computational scalability. Upon completion, developers building on Avalanche can implement contracts using mainstream software stacks supported by Linux. Software developers will be able to build smart contracts with uncountable software components supported by Linux.
Binance Smart Chain: Cartesi partnered with Binance Smart Chain (BSC) to allow advanced smart contract capabilities and massive computation for dApps atop the Binance Smart Chain. Binance Smart Chain is a highly scalable blockchain that supports smart contracts and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) programmability, featuring high TPS (transactions per second), and fast decentralized trading with low fees.
Elrond: Cartesi partnered with Elrond Network to integrate optimistic rollups for high computational scalability and enabling a Linux runtime for smart contracts. Cartesi will expand the array of possibilities for smart contract developers building on Elrond, who will be able to use mainstream software stacks supported by Linux. Besides the advantages of higher productivity given by the vast software ecosystem of the world’s prevailing OS, smart contracts on Elrond will be complemented by massive off-chain computational throughput.
Polygon(Previously Matic Network) : Cartesi partnered with Polygon to enable greater responsiveness, faster transaction processing and lower transaction fees for dApps created on Cartesi. As part of Cartesi’s ongoing plan to have Cartesi dApps provide a seamless user and developer experience, Cartesi was also pleased to announce that their Creepts dApp was successfully tested on Polygon’s testnet. Polygon will also be exploring using Cartesi for their Plasma exits.
A full list of updates on the current status of partnerships and business development can be seen via Cartesi’s Medium page here.
6. Cartesi's activity and community overview
6.1 Development activity
*The Cartesi team maintains a public Github (above) for releases, and a private Github repo for development.