Cartesi brings a real operating system to blockchain

It is no longer news that blockchain technology brought a revolution that is unique in its way by bringing decentralization that is censorship resistance, immutable and guaranteed highest security. Despite these huge advantages, most projects build on top of blockchain has known deficiencies and the most mentioned among them being interoperability and scalability with other ecosystems in the blockchain space and non-blockchain projects.
There is a common trilemma in the world of blockchain which involves three parameters which are scalability, security and decentralization. common knowledge says it is only possible to achieve two of these, not all three at the same time. Let's have a look at some examples: Bitcoin itself is only good at providing security and decentralization but lacks scalability. Ripple gains great success in scalability and security but achieved these feet at the expense of huge centralization.

The only solution that seems possible to resolve these deficiencies is the creation of layer 2 systems (scalability solutions built on top of the existing base blockchain. These solutions leave the base-layer alone and create protocols on top of it).

Cartesi : Layer 2 solution for blockchain scalability.

DApps in a blockchain environment should be able to perform computational tasks like the centralized counterpart. There should be exclusive access to the libraries, tools and languages that are standard in modern operating systems like Linux. Developers should be able to concentrate on their specific DApp logic rather than dealing with the complexity of state channels, side-chains, and the blockchain itself. More importantly, DApps should be easily portable across different blockchains. Cartesi, a layer 2 blockchain ecosystem in an attempt to provide a permanent solution to scalability issues has implemented a decentralized Linux infrastructure for scalable blockchain applications.
Cartesi is a platform for the development and deployment of scalable decentralized applications. One thing that makes Cartesi unique in nature is that its DApps are hybrid which means it incorporates both blockchain and off-chain components. The off-chain component, however, runs in a network of Cartesi Nodes, each representing the interests of a DApp user. This off-chain component is further divided into two modules which are native computations and reproducible computations. The native computation runs directly in the host hardware but has access to the node’s full processing power (including GPUs). The reproducible computations run inside Cartesi Machines that are controlled by the Cartesi Node which are self-contained Linux systems, that run on a deterministic RISC-V architecture

The Cartesi Core

These are set of basic technology that emboldens the goal of Cartesi ecosystem which includes both on-chain and off-chain components. The off-chain component is referred to as Cartesi Node which DApps developers can run on their own or through a third party that represents their interests. The crucial module of this Cartesi Node is Cartesi Machine, a custom virtual machine that emulates a RISC-V microprocessor and runs an embedded Linux distribution.

Cartesi Machines

This is a self-contained and reproducibility properties which guaranteed that any two parties with the same entrance into the initial state of a Cartesi Machine will obtain the same results when they run the machine in their Cartesi Nodes. which is crucial for consensus. This makes it to have the following peculiarities:

• Self-contained: With Cartesi Machine, there are no external sources of entropy that can alter the machine state in a non-deterministic way (such as a keyboard, or mouse, or a wall-time clock).
• Reproducible: When two Cartesi Machines start from the same initial state and run for the same number of processor cycles, they reach exactly the same final state. This is true regardless of the architecture and operating system hosting the Cartesi Node
• Full transparency: Any external observer with access to the entire state at a given processor cycle can predict the entire state at the next processor cycle.

Website: https://cartesi.io/
Whitepaper: https://cartesi.io/cartesi_whitepaper.pdf
Written by @mosunmolaoshi
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