Technical Vision Council Member Introductions

[Brandon]

Hi, everyone! I’m super excited to see the Technical Vision Forum underway and in use!

By way of introduction, I’ll be acting as a non-voting member of the Technical Vision Council in the role of secretary in order to aid the council with administrative tasks, including publishing vision council meeting minutes for the broader Cartesi community.

With that, I’d like to invite each inaugural member of the Technical Vision Council to introduce themselves in this thread below, sharing with the community a bit about their respective backgrounds and visions for the Cartesi ecosystem:

1. Augusto Teixeira (Research Unit)
2. Bruno Maia (Ecosystem Growth Unit)
3. Carlo Fragni (Prototyping Unit)
4. Carsten Munk (Cartesi Foundation)
5. Cynthia Gliga (Marketing)
6. Diego Nehab (Research Unit)
7. Erick de Moura (Cartesi Foundation)
8. Gabriel Coutinho (Rollups Unit)
9. Milton Jonathan (Technical Coordination Unit)
10. Payal Patel (Developer Advocacy Unit)
11. Pedro Argento (Rollups Unit)

I’d also like to broaden the invitation to any other core developer or member of the broader Cartesi community to share their own visions for the Cartesi ecosystem. Broad participation in the ecosystem’s governance processes by any interested stakeholder is highly encouraged, and all views and visions are welcome for discussion, regardless of whether you’re sitting on the council!

For more information on the process, please see “A Process For Setting Cartesi’s Technical Evolution In The Mainnet Era ”.

[PayalPatel]

I proudly oversee the Developer Advocacy Unit at The Cartesi Project. With a track record of over 18 years, I have excelled in various leadership and operational positions within diverse verticals and industries. My contribution to the project spans over 2 years, during which I have held different roles that have deepened my passion and intrigue for web3 and enabled me to understand the opportunities Cartesi presents in the wider landscape. As someone from a non-technical background, I confidently believe that this gives me a distinct advantage in being able to deeply understand and appreciate the journey and experiences that developers undergo.

My vision for the project is to prioritize adoption and improve accessibility for the community through better technical tools and functions. The vision council, collective members, and the community have the advantage of having a bird eye view and make decisions that benefit both the project and the community it serves. Here are a few things that I believe should be the main focus:

1. The onboarding process for developers should be made as seamless as possible. This encompasses the entire journey, from developers entering the project through any means, to easily understanding Cartesi, receiving necessary support to build, and being empowered to create meaningful projects. It is essential to focus on providing high-level frameworks and investing resources to make the developer journey smoother.

2. It is important to increase the number of use cases and address real-world issues where Cartesi’s computational/programmability scalability can truly shine. We should continuously strive to showcase a wider range of applications that can be built using Cartesi and for those on mainnet. Rolluplab should have a broader range of use cases to also inspire others to continue those, build on them or join forces!

3. Initiatives like The Experimental Week serve as valuable opportunities to provide a conducive learning environment for core contributors to utilize what has already been built and gain hands-on experience. This activity of contributors using what they have built can provide valuable insights and help to see things from the “community lens” at all times.

4. As the ecosystem continues to evolve, it is imperative that we do not operate in isolation. It is necessary for other projects to align with our futuristic vision and for us to align with theirs. This mutual collaboration will greatly support projects that can leverage our technology. We should dedicate significant efforts to foster deeper collaboration and exploration in this regard.

In order to provide seamless solutions and enable developers to experiment, it is crucial to have a deep understanding of the core technological limitations and pain points. This understanding should go beyond just documentation and involve actively addressing these technical challenges that the community faces.

[marcussouza]

That’s the way to go! Every point noted here shows our commitment to build this for the community.

[Cynthia]

Hi Governance Forumers and enthusiasts of the Vision Council! I’m Cynthia, and I’m pleased to represent the community voice and marketing vision for this initiative.

I’ve been part of the Cartesi community since 2021, even before officially joining the ecosystem. In the blockchain space since 2018, while involved in other projects and communities, my appreciation for Cartesi has grown due to the dedication of all contributors who continue building tirelessly, regardless of market trends, understanding that only technological advancements will ultimately drive industry adoption and value.

As we navigate the mainnet phase of Cartesi Rollups, my vision for the next phase is to enhance visibility for practical use cases and end-user products. Our path towards achieving growing adoption and popularity should pass through better support designed to transition projects built with Cartesi from PoCs or MVPs to the market.

I believe we need more hands-on examples and tangible, usable dApps to inspire the developer community, encouraging their creativity and a desire to build something innovative. The infrastructure development has come a long way, and now we are at a great moment to start highlighting use cases, interesting, and innovative dApps to grow our community.

By focusing on a showing rather than telling approach, developers will be more attracted to dive in and discover how certain dApps have been made possible, ultimately leading them to discover Cartesi’s capabilities. They need stepping stones to spark their creativity, and before being developers, they are users too. Functional products and dApps would legitimize and highlight the technology by themselves.

I envision developing more dApps as end-user products and even accelerator-like initiatives, with the sole purpose of assisting the projects that should be taken to the next level, turning them into usable products. Supporting these dApps to reach a launching point/product-market fit and acquire users will also rally community members’ involvement.

To make the above happen, I envision Cartesi providing improved follow-up and technical support for all projects built by Cartesi contributors, other integrators, or funded through CGP or DevAd Seed Grants, facilitating secure progress. It would also assist with various aspects, including audits, fundraising, launch strategy, marketing, etc. Additionally, it involves revisiting the Ecosystem Incentive Program we discussed a while ago - the fund allocated to support dApps’ user acquisition. Overall, continuous support for the development, visibility, and usability of the dApps built with Cartesi. Let’s bring Cartesi’s end-user products to market!

[bmaia18]

The Ecosystem group has a vision where Cartesi technology is a protocol in constant evolution and capable to adapt and excel within the blockchain ecosystem. The blockchain space is moving super fast and the modular narrative is not any longer only a “talking point”, but a reality that is evolving fast. This short summary here touches Ecosystem´s view on our protocol as well as the road to adoption

It’s impossible to ignore the impact sequencers and DA layers (often coming together, e.g. Espresso) will have on protocol evolution. Our current design was done for a reality that might not hold the main evolutionary path for the ethereum ecosystem. Under this scenario there are several visions that must converge

• A fully modular protocol: Although the Cartesi protocol has a level of modularity within its construction, we must work on further improving the inner interfaces APIs to achieve full component modularity (consensus layer, DA layer, sequencing, proving) with easy configuration and integration
• Hack then talk: As an early effort for any integration we should come with a simple proof-of-concept first, think “mini-hackathon”, to give tangibility to an integration and give first hints of its potential. This “noise that cannot be ignored” serves as a “nerd snipe” allowing us to get noticed by both communities and receive proper prioritization
• The missing (key) step: We are also missing a second step between hacking and making any integration available on production level. This gap means that no projects reach their true potential/can be demoed, and we do not gain a good end2end understanding of the issues faced during the production/devops process. We need to work on streamlining those priorities and align different working groups
• Usability and Service Layer: Regardless of how sophisticated or powerful our execution layer might be, there is absolutely no adoption if there is no convenient and easy way for builders to deploy their application. This has been proven over the last 1.5 years with our very low success on early adoption efforts, in that sense a convenience layer that abstracts away complexities is paramount for adoption
• Customers’ pain-points: We must be able to quickly address use case pain-points. We have challenges to transform customer (developers) pain-points into actual implementation actions in a timely manner and have the right sense of urgency across working units. For the verticals we see strong fit we should be making this process much more focused and efficient

[carlofragni]

Hello everyone!

My name is Carlo and I currently lead the Prototype and Support unit. I joined Cartesi in the early days and had different roles ranging from developing the inner layers of the core technology up to supporting external developers on using our technology.

My belief is that a project developing technologies no one uses/adopts inevitably dies. We have a lot of very interesting technology and we have a pipeline of ideas to develop that are equality revolutionary, however we need adoption as having an active and passionate community is what keeps a project alive.

I see adoption as an objective with multiple components that need to be addressed: we need people to know the project exists, get interested about it, motivated to know more and finally willing to be a part of the community in one or more ways continuously. Our technology is very interesting and excites a lot of smart people we talk to, but in order to motivate them to invest their time and energy to build DApps, we must make the benefits overcome the risks of developing a Cartesi DApp.

For the benefits part, beside the unique characteristics of the Cartesi Machine Linux runtime we need to add frequently demanded features. High computational capabilities invites people to dream big, but that is often blocked by not having a cheap and large data availability solution available, a way to conveniently obtain onchain data from other applications or a scheduler service, for instance. These are all problems being tackled by multiple other projects in web3 and I believe that collaboration/integration with other quality projects is a good way to add value to the parties involved: enable new use cases, increase awareness, combine user bases, etc.

We need an engaging user base, as that is also something that will attract developers. Very few dare to develop for a platform without a user base, but it’s a cyclic problem as you cannot have a user base without applications. I believe we must trigger a virtuous cycle by creating most of the first DApps to both obtain an initial user base and show other developers what the technology can do.

On the lowering of the risk front, we need to make the technology easier to learn and use and reduce uncertainty. Invest in better documentation, deeper tutorials and courses, expand the frameworks and tooling and increase the level of abstraction to make developing and deploying an idea easier, faster and cheaper to maintain. We need to provide operational parameters to developers: How much does it cost to deploy an application? What are the costs of running an appchain node? What are the costs for users to use the DApp? Etc.

We must always keep our community close, listen carefully and address it´s concerns the best way we can and as soon as possible. Every community member counts and has a vital role on the success of the project.

[jjhbk]

This looks like a very comprehensive vision for driving adoption into the Cartesi ecosystem.

[erick.demoura]

Thank you for starting this topic, Brandon. I feel very good about this forum. It has an instrumental role in offering this technology to the world and serving its real needs.

This is Erick, Cartesi’s co-founder. After reading the perspectives of our colleagues above, I find the ideas quite comprehensive around the vital topic of adoption. To that, I will just add or emphasize three points:

• The Tech Vision Forum should, as soon as possible, provide clarity to developers on the plan toward good enough decentralization, convenience, and relevance. This step is fundamental for devs to feel secure about their choice to use Cartesi as a future-proof technology.
• Still related to the topic above, this forum should remain open and inclusive so that the collective wisdom of users of the technology drives future developments toward greater relevance, utility, and security. This step is fundamental for dApp devs to know they are co-creators and have the power to maintain Cartesi excellent for their needs.
• We should prioritize having an extremely easy way for devs to deploy their first dApp on Testnet or Mainnet. Cartesi Node costs should be subsidized until we get to a phase of continuous organic adoption. This step is fundamental for developers to have a deploying experience that is as seamless as deploying a smart contract on Ethereum.

I am glad to hear your ideas and feedback on these points!

Finally, the blockchain industry itself is looking for its soul, its raison d’etre. The industry’s continuous failure to bring more value to the broader society should not be overlooked anymore. Cartesi aims to open up the decentralized application design space and is well-positioned to accomplish it from a technical standpoint. However, this alone isn’t enough. The Cartesi ecosystem, its collaborators, supporters, and community members should move forward with this deeper reflection with the intent to become a guiding star in the industry.

[milton-cartesi]

Hi there! I’m Milton, I joined Cartesi in 2020 and most of my work since then has been to help bridge our R&D with deliverables that people can use.

For me, Cartesi’s vision has always been to increase the design space of web3 DApps by providing unprecedented computational and programmability scalability. The key proposition has always been to provide a solution that could onboard millions of mainstream developers to web3 by removing common barriers for adoption: having to learn a specific language (Solidity) and having to cope with its limitations and lack of infrastructure, especially the impossibility of reusing pre-existing mainstream software. The goal of that vision has always been to “bring web3 to its full potential”, meaning that dream-like potential use cases for web3 would become possible with Cartesi.

In that sense, I believe a relevant part of the industry is now also following that vision, which has materialized as “app-specific rollups that use non-EVM execution layers capable of running mainstream software”. However, Cartesi hasn’t been given much credit for that, and competing projects are coming really close to many of our key value propositions.

Even so, I believe that Cartesi’s technology still holds a lot of promise and has matured to a point that it can be made useful. It has reached Mainnet and is seeing the rise of relevant convenience layers. In order to claim its place among the relevant web3 landscape, I believe there are three priority axes to pursue:

1. We need to pursue impactful use cases that really take advantage of the full Linux OS we uniquely provide - and thus finally realize the promise of “making the impossible possible thanks to Cartesi”. Finding real use cases is a huge challenge for every web3 project (e.g., see this opinion). Events like the Experiment Week can boost progress in this area, and hence we should double down on these efforts - especially if we can get smart people from outside Cartesi to participate, we need demographics here! I believe some dApps already developed (BugLess, World Arena) could be better explored in this respect.

2. Usability/convenience is key, and in some respects we may be ahead of the competition here. While most other projects focus on EVM compatibility, we have been exploring how to most easily deploy, run and interact with an app-specific rollup. We need to keep this going, and keep supporting Sunodo and high-level frameworks. Eating our own dogfood also seems critical here. Some core developments such as Lambda and support for running in the browser are also relevant here.

3. We need to integrate with other web3 technologies that complement ours. We have made mistakes in the past of trying to solve too many problems ourselves. In this area, adopting a modular approach to integrate with decentralized sequencers and alternative DAs is paramount for expanding the use cases we can tackle with Cartesi, as well as for increasing awareness of our tech and our relations with the broader web3 community. This approach is also crucial even for our proof system: Dave will most probably need to use RiscZero, and we may also consider finding partners to develop it with us. I also believe quick experimentation with these integrations are the way to go to foster collaboration and interest by other relevant projects and for us to have a better idea of how things can fit together.

[Augusto]

Hi, this is Augusto one of the co-founders of the project. I echo several of the perspectives that have been exposed already about Cartesi’s future:

First, adoption is clearly the highest of priorities. Cartesi has worked hard in the recent past to deliver a much more convenient development experience. Although great progress has been achieved already, this effort has to expand further (documentation, Sunodo, CartesiScan…).

Also, example applications should be fostered in order to showcase to any prospective developer what can be achieved with the computational gains of Cartesi. In the same way as any developer knows that they can reach out to SQL if they need a robust way to store data for a Web2 application, it should be clear for everyone that they can reach out to Cartesi if they need intense computational power for their DApps.

Data Avaliability integration is also a huge enabler. The “Cone of Innovation” shows us that the high computational throughput of Cartesi needs a scalable DA to achieve its full potential. It is now a consensus that DA should come through integration with an existing solution and one needs to foster the existing efforts.

On the topic of decentralization, it is mandatory to continue the steady progress on Dave. Even if some training wheels are used along the way, one needs to continue the march towards a secure and fully decentralized solution.

Having laid down the top priorities, I believe that some effort also has to be spent in researching and experimenting with new features. Modularization of the architecture, the Dehashing Device, integration with the OP Stack, Cascades… These are all directions that have to be prospected (even if at slow pace), in order to help the project choose new directions later on, confident about both the benefits and challenges involved in each such endeavor.

[carsten.munk]

Hi!

I’m Carsten and I joined Cartesi as a community member a couple of years ago. I come with a particular view which is that of a verifiable computing customer, being CTO at Zippie, which uses Cartesi. I’m a computer scientist with a research and experimentation mindset and I’ll happily talk to anyone about what I’m working on until their minds overload and their eyes turn blank.

I eventually joined to be a board director at the Cartesi Foundation and contributing on a grant to the Cartesi stack together with my amazing team of the-good-kind-of crazy people.

My vision for Cartesi is simple:

We were promised a world computer in Ethereum. It inspired many people and many people imagined usecases. We ended up with something completely alien that is too much of a leap to use and develop for. EVM isn’t doing the job and only high priests can do useful things with it.

Cartesi, combined with Ethereum, is the answer to the question “Does a world computer have to be so different than how modern cloud computing works today? Why does it need to feel so alien to developers?”

I believe that Cartesi needs to take a 90-degree turn and steer away from becoming another alien world-computer and closer to that of a world computer for the planet it’s on and its biome. Because we are out still there, still waiting for that to fulfill the promise of blockchain and decentralised systems. Make blockchain fun again. We need this more than ever in this world.