gm,
Join us on Twitter for our first CGP Spotlight where we will chat about DCA.Monster and Drand tooling projects and their recent milestones!
Time: 3:00PM UTC
Host: @hellenstans
Guests: @pmturci from DCA.Monster
@fabiooshiro @AnomalRoil from Drand tooling for Cartesi.
Don’t forget to set your reminders here: https://x.com/cartesiproject/status/1731991818496303497?s=20
Notes from the spaces
December 12th, 2023 - @3pm UTC
Recording
Hosted by @hellen
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This was the first CGP Spotlight Twitter space - a series aimed at highlighting Cartesi ecosystem builders and grantees from CGP, and discussing their project updates and milestones.
Introductions
@hellenstans, Grants steward at Cartesi
@pablo, behind the project DCA.Monster
@Yolan, part of Drand team at Protocol Labs
@Fabio, working at Calindra as a partner
What is DCA.Monster and if you could discuss recent milestones?
The DCA.Monster project originated from ETHGlobal Paris with the idea of making it easier for new users in the blockchain to purchase crypto through Dollar Cost Averaging. I wanted to explore DCA with stream tokens, which was impossible to build on EVM, and that’s how I began building on Cartesi and won first prize.
DCA.Monster has two deliverables: streamable tokens and an Automated Market Maker (AMM). The streamable tokens primitive has already been accomplished in the first milestone. This allows users to transfer tokens over time instead of in a single transaction. The start and end of the stream can be defined by block numbers. During this time, tokens are transferred linearly.
Handling these volumes of streamable token transfers and computing balances, along with the required computations, is why Cartesi was a perfect fit for DCA.Monster.
The design targets high efficiency, written in Python, and uses an SQLite database for storing all balances and ongoing streams.
The executed code has already undergone a series of benchmark tests to prove its efficiency. It runs within a Cartesi rollup in prediction mode, and it scales very well. I have tested the benchmark for 25,000 to 2 million concurrent streams, and all ran within 3 seconds.
With the second milestone, the AMM will allow trading tokens and providing liquidity easily.
What is Drand tooling?
Drand stands for distributed randomness. Drand is a distributed randomness provider that anyone can use when they need public randomness or value that no one can predict until it’s been emitted. Once emitted, everyone can verify and confirm that it came from Drand.
The Drand project was initially conducted as a research project and was launched in 2019 by Cloudflare. Later, it was adopted by Filecoin and Protocol Labs, providing randomness to other projects as well.
The tooling provides a way to generate random numbers within the Cartesi machine.
How is Drand tooling useful for developers in the Cartesi ecosystem?
The idea is to provide public randomness. So, as soon as you are developing a game or application that requires randomness, you might want to use Drand. This applies to gaming dApps, lotteries, and airdrops where distributed, verifiable randomness is useful.
How does Drand differ from other random beacon projects?
Most random beacon projects require users to trust that they are honest, unlike Drand, which is decentralized and distributed. Drand is a public good that provides randomness to everyone freely.
What are some of the exciting features you are building for anyone looking to try out DCA.Monster?
I am currently working on an AMM that operates with streamable tokens and seamlessly integrates them to enable Dollar-Cost Averaging.
By default, when a user engages in stream swaps on DCA.Monster, they are exposed to all the price ranges a buyer might encounter during the duration of the stream.
DCA.Monster is already live on Sepolia and ready to be tested by anyone who is interested in trying it out.
Apart from the concept of Dollar Cost Averaging, my plan is to continue building with Cartesi rollups and introduce new features like conditional swaps. This means that, based on a custom rule, your stream swaps or token streams will be executed or not, depending on the condition that anyone can set.
In the short term, the goal is to complete milestone two, refine the frontend, and deploy it to the mainnet somewhere at the end of Q1.
How does DCA.Monster utilize Cartesi?
The way it works is a combination of the idea of streaming tokens and an AMM. To make them work seamlessly, you need to account for all the ongoing streams happening between any user and the AMM.
All of this wouldn’t be possible in an EVM smart contract because it would require computation to account for all the ongoing streams and compute balances for users, the AMM, and the liquidity pools. Implementing it on Cartesi rollups was necessary as it can handle millions of streams, enabling the computation of balances and providing a seamless experience of Dollar Cost Averaging with infinite granularity.
I will be exploring how to standardize and make DCA.Monster more useful for developers building in the ecosystem.
DCA.Monster
Website | Twitter | Github
Drand tooling for Cartesi
Website | Twitter | Github
Stay updated on these project’s progress on Cartesi Discord under the #spotlight channel.
For support when applying for grant, reach out to the Grants Council via the Cartesi Discord under #cgp-questions channel.
We are always excited to provide support to proposers!
January 30th, 2024 - @5pm UTC
Recording 2
Hosted by @hellen
This was the second CGP Spotlight Twitter Space - a series aimed at highlighting Cartesi ecosystem builders and grantees from CGP, discussing their project updates and milestones.
@Dimitar, behind the project Painting dApp.
@Ayodeji, part of Web3bridge, doing Operations.
@Geraldine, part of Think&Dev team building AI License Plate Violation detector project.
@Solene, part of HerDAO.
@Gabriel Barros, part of the Developer Advocacy team and also Grants Council Technical reviewer.
What is HerDAO and your previous experience hosting two Cartesi x HerDAO workshops.
@Solene HerDAO focus is developer-focused DAO championing for diversity + inclusivity through onboarding women and non-binary folks to web3. HerDAO started collaborating with Cartesi around December to organize two workshops across Africa. We have had many web2 developers transitioning to web3 attend the workshops and ask questions. I think in my opinion Cartesi is a good gateway for those developers from web2 transitioning to web3. The workshop involved how to build an NFT project and the DevAd team was very supportive and offering technical support throughout the process.
HerDAO was also able to organize a builder event in Nigeria, thanks to Cartesi. We currently have different activations in Africa, for example, at the moment we are in Tanzania and Kenya doing educational tours in these countries and we thank Cartesi for the support.
Our 2024 plan is to have other strategies around technical education, both global and local. Our roadmap is huge and we are excited to releasing that soon.
What is Web3bridge, and how the Cartesi x Web3bridge masterclass is ongoing?
(@Ayodeji) Web3bridge is a program designed to train blockchain developers in Nigeria and across Africa. Our program has a hybrid fashion where we host students from our two facilities to come together and code.
We have an online plan for students who are not able to come on-site. We have been running this since 2019.
Our Cartesi x Web3bridge masterclass has been amazing and is being carried out by DevAd team. Our goal is to train developers building on Cartesi and have them build projects.
It’s a one-month program with a top priority in on-site developers with 24 developers in the program coding and living together. We are in our fourth week and we are already seeing the majority of the developers in their building phase. In three to four days, we should see what they have built. Developers travelled to Lagos to be part of this masterclass and six people from DevAd team are already on-site to help developers during the workshop.
We expect a minimum of five projects coming out of this masterclass.
Our 2024 plan is to have more developers onboarded through our bootcamp and workshops and run more workshops. We already have two Kenyans onboard in our current workshop and we plan to increase the number of developers and aim for two hundred developers in different countries and increase our facilities.
We plan to have two hacker houses for our bootcamps. We are also planning for a Web3bridge conference where communities will come together and collaborate with others in the broader ecosystem.
What is Cartesi Grants Program, what is Wave 1, and what we are funding?
(@Hellen) Honestly, listening to your plans and efforts to onboard more developers in web3 reminds me of a tweet I came across that said “Web3 needs Africa, Africa does not need web3”. I believe that some of the best real-world use cases of blockchain will come from these emerging markets and this is something at Cartesi we are actively working towards. The goal of the Cartesi Grants Program is to meaningfully fund projects contributing to the long-term growth of our ecosystem.
A bit of background with CGP is we started as a pilot program to experiment with how to effectively allocate capital to projects and builders building in the ecosystem while giving the community autonomy to decide on what gets funded.
A Grants Council was formed and we quickly realized applicants had challenges understanding the application and review process, or what kind of project ideas they should submit. We have launched Wave 1, which is a revision of our program to address these challenges.
Wave 1: We are allocating $500k to four different categories of funding:
Gaming: We are looking to promote the development of games that leverage Cartesi technology. We want to promote projects building public goods and open-source software so any tools and frameworks that can be re-used by other developers and simplifies game development on Cartesi is highly encouraged.
Developer tooling: We want to support tools that improve the developer experience on Cartesi. These include any frameworks, analytics, and monitoring tools that make it easy to build applications on Cartesi.
Research & Integrations: For this category, we have two different tracks:
(i) Research and POC of integration
For this track, we want to fund developers interested in integrating Cartesi technology with another technology. We are specifically interested in integrations that are exploring new and novel use cases for Cartesi.
We encourage applicants to first apply for an initial grant to explore POC of this integration, and then apply for an additional grant to scale this integration.
(ii) Research and Development
We believe web3 is a fast-evolving space and we would like to fund teams that want to do research on some of the interesting topics in the space. This also includes research around the Cartesi Virtual Machine, RISC-V, ZK, and Cartesi.
New ideas & dApps.
The Grants Council wanted to have one category for open applications and invite the community to propose new ideas and experiments that don’t fit in the other three categories.
So if you are someone with any novel ideas and want to experiment with Cartesi, this category is for you.
We are also interested to see projects that want to build solutions around DeFi, NFTs, and consensus mechanisms.
Overall we interpreted these categories very broadly and if you’re someone looking to build in the Cartesi ecosystem, feel free to submit your application!
We encourage our previous grantees and early stage builders to apply and anyone interested in building cool projects in the ecosystem. Grants Council is already onboarded and ready to review your proposals.
Anything in particular you hope to see get submitted? What are you excited for?
(@Gabriel) We want to see projects built, we are available to offer support on Cartesi Discord, be it 15 mins, or half an hour. We also encourage posting your inquiries on discord for the wider community support.
If you need any technical expertise to get help shaping your proposals we are here to help. We want to see new things built, new integrations and this is a good opportunity for everyone both in web2 and web3.
A good proposal should have a clear idea of what you’re trying to build, and how you’re going to leverage Cartesi. Mostly what are some of the positive impacts your proposal is going to in the ecosystem overall.
Some minor details, what do you need from us, technical support, leveraging other resources, make a thought process for what you’re going to build to make your proposal clear. Overall we are available to offer any support you might need.
I’m personally interested in seeing more games built. I would like to see frameworks that help improve the developer experience for other developers building in the ecosystem.
What is painting dApp and how does the project leverage Cartesi?
(@Dimitar) We built a drawing application using Cartesi rollups to develop our application. We first started using Sunodo as it helps with the required environment setup and useful technology for backend application and is very useful for anyone building on Cartesi. You can visit Sunodo.io they have very useful documentation.
The frontend of the drawing app is based on React and also utilizing JS library.
Users are able to draw any kind of illustration and show different output in a different format.
Each drawing is saved in input transaction to onchain rollup smart contract then will provide information to the frontend for the application with something Cartesi calls notices and you can generate them through a GraphQL API.
The application is able to generate any keys by simply requesting a rollup to create vouchers and then through a transaction a user is able to mint an NFT.
We are using Cartesi because it simplifies the development of building an application for Web2 developers. Our team consists of web2 developers transitioning to web3 and Cartesi provides tools to interact with blockchain languages.
We chose Cartesi rollups because we are able to use languages we are used to and you can interact with rollups with simple transactions and simple APIs which are familiar to any developer. It simplifies the development process for web2 developers transitioning to web3.
What is AI License Plate Violation detector project and how you leverage Cartesi?
(@Geraldine) Think&Dev team is behind the project AI License Plate Violation detector and is one of the Cartesi Grants Program grantees.
The AI License Plate Violation Detector (Whistleblower) Dapp is a revolutionary application leveraging chain-verifiable image recognition powered by AI algorithms. Operating seamlessly within the Cartesi Machine, this innovative system specializes in identifying license plates associated with legal violations. By securely storing collected data, including images and license plate information, on the blockchain, the application establishes irrefutable evidence of traffic infractions.
AI License Plate Violation detector
Github | Twitter | Demo
Stay updated on Painting dApp and AI License plate violation detector project’s progress on Cartesi Discord under the #spotlight channel.
To understand Wave 1 grants process overview and submit your proposals, click here.
Need assistance crafting your proposal for the Cartesi Grants Program?
Click here to reserve a spot and chat with the Grants Council.
We are always excited to provide support to proposers!
Notes from the Space
March 5th, 2024 - @3pm UTC
Recording 3
Hosted by @hellen
This was the third CGP Spotlight Twitter Space - a series aimed at highlighting Cartesi ecosystem builders and grantees from CGP, discussing their project updates and milestones.
Introductions
@Pela, part of Think&dev team.
@Pipo, part of Think&dev team
@Mercedes, part of Think&dev team
Pinned posts
https://x.com/cartesiproject/status/1752364810358980956?s=20
https://x.com/cartesiproject/status/1754822322463146436?s=20
https://x.com/cartesiproject/status/1757361480234664146?s=20
Introductions on the Cartesi Grants Program
@Hellen Welcome everyone to our third CGP Spotlight Twitter space where we highlight ecosystem projects that have been funded through the Cartesi Grants Program. Our funding thesis for CGP is to support developers launching novel applications that will draw new users and maintain Cartesi’s long-term growth. We have allocated $500k to four different categories of funding during wave 1. These categories are Gaming, Developer tooling, Research & integrations, and lastly New ideas & dApps. The baseline criteria are projects need to utilize Cartesi technology in a meaningful way. New projects, developers, and previous grantees are welcome to apply. We welcome feedback throughout the space.
What is Think&dev and how did you come across Cartesi?
@Pela Think&dev is at the forefront of blockchain development. We are not just developing technology but also shaping the future of decentralized applications. We have three years of experience with our team providing blockchain development services either through documentation and sourcing or consulting. We have expertise in developing solutions either in blockchains or AI ranging from developing blockchain smart contracts to developing solutions either in blockchain or AI ranging from developing blockchain smart contracts or developing blockchain networks in compatible EVM chains or non-EVM chains. We are a group of blockchain developers and coders with expertise who we guide to build in the web3 space. We are passionate about hosting hackathons and bringing passionate people into the space.
We came across Cartesi in 2022 in ETHLatam and from there worked together in several hackathons.
What is AI License plate violation detector and how are you utilizing Cartesi?
@Pipo AI license plate violation detector or as we like to call it Whistleblower dApp is a license plate detector assigned to identify license plate algorithms using AI. The main idea is to detect vehicles in traffic violations and being able to establish a whole process of charging fees for the car owner. The detector uses advanced image recognition techniques like YOLO, which is an algorithm for object segmentation and for image processing running in Python. We use YOLO to run the license plates and use optical character recognition to extract characters for the license plate.
With the AI exponential growth, we started thinking about how we can use Cartesi. Given the capabilities for Cartesi to emulate a virtual machine over a Linux system, we identified an opportunity to use AI models on Cartesi to run image recognition algorithms. Running this in a Linux environment provided by Cartesi with optimal data efficiency and integrating with blockchain technology for validation of the results while doing that in a transparent and secure way.
Could you share more about each milestone?
@Pela We divided our project into three milestones. The first milestone was to Create a Proof of Concept (PoC) to validate the idea and focus on what we aim to achieve. This included tackling challenges such as selecting suitable models for processing with Cartesi virtual machine and using Python scripts. This required building different packages of wheels for the RISC-V architecture. We put particular emphasis on accuracy and speed aiming for clear computation from the input and output.
After playing around with this, we decided to use YOLO tiny version for the character recognition. Once we had the full flow we got into the second milestone that was built around user-friendly interface because we are trying to build a dApp that everyone can use. We developed two methods for interacting with the dApp. One is the CLI and the other one was through our react-based frontend. Lastly, the documentation was the third milestone. We have the entire process documented on the repo and we made a particular focus on how we built everything because besides the dApp it was a really nice experience to contribute to the Cartesi ecosystem and give developers accessibility to tools that anyone can use.
What would you say was the biggest challenge when building the Whistleblower dApp?
@Pipo I think our main challenge was the implementation of the Artificial intelligence algorithms in the Cartesi environment. This task required installing Python libraries. This can be a complicated task because of the lack of compatibility with the RISC-V architecture which is inherent to Cartesi virtual machine.
What’s next for the Whistleblower dapp?
@Pipo We are currently in the process of preparing a new grant proposal to advance our project further. Some of the key initiatives we want to undertake are implementing user vouchers and reports which will provide a smooth user experience and we are excited for the impact this will bring.
Any advice for those looking to apply for a Cartesi Grant?
@Pipo My advice is just to submit your application if you have an idea that you think is good. Don’t be shy. We found really great people from Cartesi team who helped us in every aspect during our development process. The program itself offers an excellent opportunity for people with excellent ideas to bring them to reality so don’t hold back, just apply! The Grants Council is usually available to guide you and help you throughout the process.
@Hellen Yes, we do provide support to anyone interested in applying for grants you can reach out to the grants council or book a call with us. We are supporting developers interested to build novel ideas and experiments in the space, so if that is you, please feel free to apply.
What are some of the things you are excited to see in this age of AI
@Pela We are witnessing a lot of things happening in the AI space right now. There is a common misconception that AI is here to replace us but I see AI more as a tool that helps us amplify our capabilities and be more efficient. AI in the blockchain space is a game-changer especially in improving supply chain, financial security, and other industry possibilities. AI is being used to predict market trends for businesses and investors alike and I see a lot of interesting use cases that are more advanced like consensus algorithms and detecting malicious transactions that are more useful. On top of that, we also just shared the capabilities of AI with image recognition.
@Hellen This is very interesting and AI in bug hunting in smart contracts would also be very interesting to see.
@Zac I loved your proposal and figured I would jump on the call and hear more about it. I watched the demo for the whistleblower dApp and it’s really cool. Think&dev has been working with Cartesi for over a year and congratulations on everything.
@Hellen Thank you everyone for joining us. Remember to share about CGP with your friends, we are always excited to receive and review your proposals!
AI License Plate Violation detector
Github | Twitter | Demo
Stay updated on AI License plate violation detector project’s progress on Cartesi Discord under the #spotlight channel.
To understand Wave 1 grants process overview and submit your proposals, click here.
Need assistance crafting your proposal for the Cartesi Grants Program?
Click here to reserve a spot and chat with the Grants Council.
We are always excited to provide support to proposers!