Check out updates on Cartesi Machine, Cartesi Rollups, and Noether

Looking for the latest progress on Blockchain OS components? You’ve come to the right place! As described in our roadmap article, we have been moving towards regular and frequent updates to keep our community informed of the progress we make and bring Blockchain OS to a production level where a beautiful and diverse DApp ecosystem is thriving.

If you are not familiar with the composition of blockchain operating systems, it is recommended that you read these introductory articles before reading this article to help you quickly understand us:

• Cartesian Machine

• Cartesian Rollups

• Cartesian Compute

• Noether

If you want a quick overview of February’s developments, check out the roadmap below, which includes new features for Cartesi Machine, Cartesi Rollups, and Noether.

The Cartesian Machine

Cartesi Machine is Cartesi’s deterministic virtual machine that emulates the RISC-V architecture and can run a mature Linux operating system. Cartesi Machine is Cartesi’s groundbreaking technology that can provide a runtime for decentralized applications built with mainstream software.

The Microarchitecture

• The first Solidity interpreter implementation for microarchitectures is currently under review.

• The C++ microarchitecture interpreter automated tests have been updated to increase coverage.

• Improved the mechanism for stopping the microarchitecture interpreter.

Self-Hosted Distributions

• The next Rollups sample release will bring a new rootfs build system that improves the developer experience, especially for DApps that need to install dependencies.

• Because our new Cartesi Machine Emulator SDK version (0.14.0) brings compressed instructions and floating point support.

• We’re excited to have completed this roadmap, and we think you’ll be excited to try it too.

Rollups Infrastructure

Here is a list of improvements we have made to the Machine Emulator and its components to support the progress of Cartesi Rollups:

• The compressed instructions are released as part of our new Cartesi Machine Emulator SDK version (0.14.0).

Other improvements

• Prototype of hypervisor support: KVM is already booting Linux and executing the classic "Hello world!" test program.

• Migration of some components from gRPC to JSON-RPC is still in progress.

Cartesian Rollups

Cartesi Rollups is Cartesi's Optimistic rollup layer-2 system, which relies on the Cartesi Machine and allows developers to create scalable decentralized applications using mainstream software components. It consists of on-chain and off-chain components, allowing the blockchain to provide data availability, order entry data, bridge tokens between layer 1 and layer 2, and act as a referee in the event of disputes.

Road to Mainnet

• We have released version 0.13.0 of the official examples repository, which introduces a new rootfs build system. DApps can now use standard RISC-V binaries, so dependencies can be easily added using standard package managers. Let's take a look.

• Our development team continues to focus on Cartesi Rollups Alpha Release 0.9. The main work continues on the refactoring and implementation of the off-chain code for the validator nodes.

DApp Validator

• Our deployment systems and cloud-based execution infrastructure are currently adapting to the architectural simplification that will come with Cartesi Rollups alpha version 0.9.0.

Support for Computational Oracles

Zippie’s development team has received a grant from the Cartesi Foundation for Cartesi’s computational oracle solution, called Cartesi Compute. Zippie reports that work on the grant continues to make progress.

Milestones 1 and 2 are in the review phase and include the following tasks:

• ipfs-server, machine-manager changes approved and released

• Added 8Mb file IPFS download test

• Post-development cleanup and better restore messages for docker-compose templates

• Ongoing work to update documentation and tutorials with these changes

• General cleanup for release preparation

Arbitration for Rollups

• We will temporarily pause this work process to focus on the work on the road to mainnet.

CTSI-incentivized automatic execution of credentials

• It is important to mention that this functionality depends on the scheduler component.

• See status updates for scheduler activities.

CTSI Incentivized Transaction Sequencer

• It is important to mention that this functionality depends on the scheduler component.

• See status updates for scheduler activities.

Noether

Noether is Cartesi’s proof-of-stake system for incentivizing blockchain interactions. Node operators and stakers participating in Noether are financially rewarded for timely execution of future Cartesi ecosystem services such as decentralized sequencer, credential execution, liquidity provider, data availability, and validator declarations.

The Scheduler

We have temporarily stopped the development of Scheduler to focus on the work on PoS.

Explorer

Staking

Enhancements:

• After reviewing the reports from Google’s Lighthouse tool, we made changes to improve our scores in SEO, accessibility, and best practices.

repair:

• We fixed the full unstake operation to avoid being imprecise during the conversion and leaving dust shares.

• We fixed the alignment of content in notifications

• We fixed the staking pool user page to keep the “Pool Info” tab selected.

• We fixed the list of decommissioned nodes shown in the pool management screen. Now the manager will see the nodes decommissioned by the pool instead of the private nodes decommissioned by the manager.

maintainance:

• We removed feature flags for staking pool commissions and user pages. They are now fixed features.

• We also updated several dependencies, paying special attention to the Luxon library, which addressed a high-severity vulnerability.

rollups

• We added a rollups-docker file to be able to build the rollups-explorer image.

• We modified our graphQL queries to use the new backend changes, thar serves indexed data from rollup v0.8 and v0.9.

Contribute to blockchain operating systems

Interested in developing with us? We’re always looking for collaborative team members! Feel free to contact us via Discord, click on the link to view our current career openings, or send your resume with an introduction to our HR email: hr@cartesi.io

About Cartesi

Cartesi is an application-specific Rollups execution layer with a Linux runtime. Cartesi Rollups can be deployed as layer 2 (on top of Ethereum), layer 3 (on top of Optimism, Arbitrum, zkEVM chains, etc.), or as sovereign rollups. It opens up the design space for more expressive and computationally intensive blockchain applications.

• DApps are deployed on their own customizable application-specific rollup chains;

• DApps will not compete with each other for scarce block space in the Cartesi ecosystem;

• Cartesi provides orders of magnitude more computing power than Ethereum or L2;

• Developers can write decentralized logic using their favorite libraries, compilers, and other time-tested open source components;

• DApps retain the strong security and censorship resistance of the underlying blockchain;

• Cartesi Rollups open up the design space for more expressive and computationally intensive blockchain applications;

• Cartesi Rollups can be deployed as layer 2 (on top of Ethereum), layer 3 (on top of Optimism, Arbitrum, zkEVM chains, etc.), or as sovereign rollups;