Blockchains were originally designed to reach consensus through full redundancy, replicating storage and re-executing computations across all the nodes in their networks. As we could expect from theory (and in fact verify in practice!), this results in an unscalable environment. Real-world computations and massive data on blockchains are impractical or even impossible.

The blockchain community has been relentlessly searching for solutions to make their platforms and technology more scalable. Scalable blockchains enable a new range of exciting decentralized applications (DApps).

There are a number of unique Layer-1 and Layer-2 scalability solutions under development. Layer-1 solutions are implemented at the base-level protocol of the blockchain itself. Layer-2 solutions use smart contracts to move as much data and computation as possible off-chain. These solutions bring different promises and trade-offs and both will have an important role to play in the future of blockchain technology.

Yet, even as these technologies are being developed, it is possible to see that something is missing. What we need is a comprehensive infrastructure layer that bridges the gap between blockchains and the real world.

Welcome to Cartesi! Capturing the essence of, and going beyond, Layer-2 scalability solutions, we are an infrastructure layer that grants blockchains the superpower to achieve consensus over real world computations happening off-chain.

Cartesi embraces the security and the economy of the blockchain, while enabling real world (and intensive! think massive amounts of data) computational tasks. With Cartesi, there’s no need to rely on central authorities, trusted third parties or on reputation systems, which are often prone to sybil attacks. Using Cartesi, DApp developers will be able to:

Write programs that can have their execution states verified and reproduced across different network nodes;

Rely on the performance of off-chain processing (which can even include the GPU!)

Use any source of data of whatever required size;

Obtain consensus about the execution states of programs running off-chain;

Resolve disputes at negligible cost on the blockchain.

In fact, moving computations off-chain with Cartesi brings several advantages beyond scalability. DApp developers can use the programming languages, tools, libraries, software, and services they are already familiar with!

Off-chain computations are performed by Cartesi nodes representing each interested party. These nodes emulate realistic systems based on the RISC-V architecture, under the Linux operating system. The emulator is deterministic by design, meaning that no matter if a Cartesi node is running on Intel or AMD, Linux or Windows, mobile or desktop, the evolution of the machine states will be rigorously the same given the same initial conditions.

The parties involved in a contract or transaction perform the computations off-chain and, if some party happens to disagree with a certain machine state delivered from another party, the case goes to “court”, in the form of a verification game on the blockchain (similarly to Truebit). At the end of the game, the party with just cause is compensated while the misbehaving party is penalized.

The verification game imposes a negligible weight on the blockchain. It’s space and time complexity is of the order of the logarithm of the original computation so that verifying years of computations made by a supercomputer would take no more than a few hundred operations on the blockchain. On the other end, off-chain nodes involved in a dispute experience at most twice the effort required by the original computation. This is computationally cheap, especially for the blockchain. And when we realize that disputes will arise very rarely, we see that Cartesi virtually eliminates the gap in computation power and storage between smart contracts and modern computer programs.

Stay tuned! There’s much more to Cartesi’s technology. In terms of applications, Cartesi is limited only by the imagination of developers. We believe that Cartesi has the true potential to revolutionize blockchains by laying the groundwork for a new generation of decentralized apps and services. Let’s take a look at a few industry changing examples.

Blockchain. Cartesi captures the essence of Layer-2 scalability solutions. Smart contracts can do the heavy lifting off-chain and resolve disputes on-chain. Developers will only need little engagement to set up their Dapp on top of Cartesi through a simple API.

Science, healthcare, and more. A trustless supercomputer that utilizes limitless idle computer power. Millions of computers sit idle and unused when they could be benefiting science and society. Cartesi allows individuals to earn tokens for lending out their computer power in a secure, efficient, and verifiable way at negligible cost. All while helping the world look for cures for cancer, solve serious scientific issues, or even help search for extraterrestrial life! Exciting news to come on this for our MVP.

Computer Science. A trustless marketplace for AI and computational tasks. With the power of Cartesi’s decentralized automated verification, developers will be able to create services that allow new DApps to outsource and distribute work. These include machine learning, data analysis, or computational intensive tasks that require experts in the field. All without the need of trust among the parties or relying on reputation. This would open possibilities for lower cost AI, developed by outsourced experts and bots.

Finance: Futures & insurance markets. Cartesi applications will be able to to read the contents of multiple blockchains . This will enable smart contracts that depend on the information of other existing smart contracts. The key applications are interoperability between blockchains and services such as futures and insurance markets.

Web 3.0. In Cartesi’s roadmap, we plan for a replayable networking port. This port will allow Cartesi to settle disputes over computations that use network connections. The decentralization of services will become much simpler, paving the road towards a truly decentralized Internet.

Cartesi is indispensable to any oracle solution that deals with massive, complex data. DApps are able to settle disputes over intensive computations performed on massive amounts of external data to which the blockchain has no access. High, infeasible fees to store tons of data directly on the blockchain are no longer necessary and full access to the real world is at your fingertips.