We're talking about the decentralized internet.
This is a whole new layer that is going on top of every single thing that we do.
And because we're able to provide this amazing scaling on computation,
we can give ourselves the luxury of running a real operating system on the virtual machine, right?
So this is the basic breakthrough on Cartesi.
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Today, I sat down with the CEO and founder of Cartesi,
Erick de Moura.
You've got to hear what he has to say about what's coming up for this project,
one of my favorite projects of all time.
If you didn't know, we are a partner with Cartesi.
And we can't wait to see where this one goes.
If you watch the recent run-up from Polygon, another ETH Layer 2 solution,
then I think you'll start to understand the potential that Cartesi has to unlock.
And they are playing the long game, one reason why we love them.
They've also got some really interesting stuff when it comes to poker,
so stay tuned, check out the interview,
and let's see what Erick has to say about Cartesi's development.
Guys, I'm excited today to be joined with Erick de Moura.
He is the CEO and founder of Cartesi.
You guys know if you've watched this channel, I love Cartesi.
I think if you love Polygon, you're going to love Cartesi.
It's got a lot of similarities, but also very unique.
First and foremost, Erick,
welcome to the channel. How are you doing today?
Pretty good. Thanks for having me here.
I'm very excited to go over your questions.
- And let's go through it. - Yeah, absolutely.
So let's just start off with what the people want to know.
You guys have a lot in, you know, similarity with Polygon, formerly MATIC--
I mean, the ticker is still MATIC, but everybody knows now it's Polygon.
Both launched on the Binance Launchpad,
both ETH Layer 2 solutions,
both projects that have seen tremendous growth over the last year,
but Polygon managed almost to get all the way into the top 10,
and right now, I'm not sure--
let me see where exactly are you guys on CoinMarketCap right now.
Very underrated, I would say.
I'll pull that number here in just a second.
But what do you guys have that, you know, Polygon doesn't have?
What's something that could lead you guys maybe to a similar run-up to what Polygon has done?
You guys are at 172 right now.
They're in the top 20.
How do you guys get there?
Yeah. Good question.
First of all, I think, you know, MATIC has a--
It's already on mainnet.
They have applications. They have an ecosystem running on them.
And they have a lot of merit.
And they're doing a great, great work.
By the way, we are partners with MATIC.
We're about to launch-- we are launching a poker game together with them.
- We can get in this later. - Yeah
But, you know, MATIC,
we can say that they prioritize getting fast to market.
And they did a very good job taking ideas like Plasma and sidechains
and implementing something that was critical for applications on Ethereum, right?
It is a pressing problem.
We need to scale that thing.
So we see all these applications running on MATIC,
and this is great.
Cartesi took a different path.
We decided to implement rollups.
Rollups is a technique that more recently has been the preferred technique
or let's say paradigm that the Ethereum Foundation has been breaching and trying to in order to develop
because in rollups, we have better security guarantees.
Namely, you're guaranteed that data is on chain,
you don't have the data availability problem,
and there is more security.
So when you would think about applications that, you know, deal with a lot of money,
there's a lot of money at stake,
then probably it's better to go for rollups,
something that's more secure than sidechains.
Of course, expect these things to play out together.
We'll see a very diverse ecosystem in the future.
Sidechains will have their space,
and rollups will also have their space.
So Cartesi now is going super fast.
We are super eager to have our solutions out there.
You know, the most important thing for me is to see this ecosystem growing and people developing.
Man, I can't wait to have that moment happening and see things flourishing on our ecosystem.
Yeah. I think that's amazing because, you know, what people don't know
who have recently came into crypto because most people who I talked to, honestly,
that I meet in public,
and they recognize me, they talk to me, I always ask them,
"I want to know how long you've been watching the channel. When did you get in crypto?"
For the vast majority of people that I meet,
January.
January is when they got in, they got interested.
Polygon obviously had the rebrand I think at the beginning of this year.
I can't remember exactly when it was.
But for years, MATIC just out there and did nothing.
Not in terms of the development, but in terms of the price, it just sat there.
They built. They built. They built.
They had this big rebrand, and then all of a sudden, you know, things really started taking off.
And I believe Cartesi is very similar in regards to the price.
Like, you guys are just kind of sitting back,
and you guys are working. You're grinding. You're doing all the stuff that needs to happen.
I really see you guys having a very similar run to what Polygon has done
because you guys do everything the right way.
We've had a lot of partners on this channel we love,
a lot of the projects we worked with,
but I got to--
you guys are my favorite.
You guys are literally my favorite project that we've ever worked with on this channel
because I see the potential in what you guys are doing
and the intelligence to be okay sitting back and developing and waiting,
and I think you guys are going to get something similar.
So I want to ask you about ETH Layer 2.
So it might be a little confusing to people because you have Ethereum2,
which ETH2 is a different-- or ETH version 2 as some people call it,
that is when proof-of-stake gets added to Ethereum,
you know, maybe two years from now, maybe a year from now,
when that thing will be close to completion.
Vitalik Buterin came out and said it's still going to be a ways off,
but even after ETH2 is out,
there will still be a need for ETH Layer 2 solutions.
So these are different.
These are kind of like short-term fixes.
These are ways to make the Ethereum network faster now before the ETH2 rollout.
But for Cartesi being an ETH Layer 2 solution,
how do you see yourself fitting into the Ethereum environment after ETH2 launches completely?
Yeah. That's a very frequent question that we have.
And the very straight answer is it's only going to get better
because these scaling benefits are going to just multiply.
Right? So,
if Ethereum gets faster, cheaper to use, and you still have rollups on top of them,
you're going to have even more transaction throughputs,
more compression of data,
more computation that you can do on top of whatever Ethereum 2.0 is going to provide.
So, in that sense, anyone implementing rollups, any rollups Layer 2 solution running on Ethereum,
will also benefit from this.
Yeah. And I think people have to understand how big Ethereum is going to be.
I mean, I believe Ethereum will pass Bitcoin
at some point, in market cap.
I don't think there's even a question about it.
In my opinion.
But we're talking about the decentralized internet.
This is a whole new layer that is going on top of every single thing that we do.
And so I think if I heard you correctly,
what you're saying here is that even after ETH2 is totally out,
it's still going to need to be faster,
and you guys are still going to be able to plug in
and be able to make transactions that much faster because we're going to be talking about
who knows, billions of transactions, you know, at some point one day, I think.
So is that kind of the way you see things happening?
- Absolutely. Absolutely. So-- - Yeah.
I think scaling is not going to be enough for sure with ETH2.
We're going to need much more.
And the rollups will aid a lot in that direction.
But one important thing to say here is that, of course, we have positioned ourselves as a rollup solution
that allows us to get this amazing computational scalability.
And because we're able to provide this amazing scaling on computation,
we can give ourselves the luxury of running a real operating system on the virtual machine.
Right? So this is the basic breakthrough on Cartesi.
We're not only solving the scalability issue with rollups.
We are actually going one step further in using this computational power
to actually allow people to develop smart contracts using mainstream software stacks.
And for us, that's the big leap.
Yeah. And I think, the fact that you guys use Linux is very interesting
because I don't really come from a computer background.
Like, I'm not a developer or--
like, I didn't even know that, you know, Linux was an operating system that people still used.
I thought it was just kind of like quirky people like to use it.
But Linux is actually used by a huge number of corporations and different firms across the world.
- So what went into that decision? - Yeah.
Yeah.
93% or so of the top websites in the world, web servers in the world, run on Linux.
Nuts.
And the majority of software developers are used to Linux.
They can decide to develop software on macOS or Windows or whatever,
but most developers are familiar and they are able to start a server and run Linux.
So--
And the choice for Linux is because we want to abide by open standards
because on blockchain, everything's about being, you know, using open source
and doing open standards.
So we choose RISC-V architecture to emulate our, you know,
to be the emulator of our VM, which is an open standard.
And we choose a Linux because it's also an open standard,
and it's the most important operating system in the world.
Yeah. I mean, it's--
I'm doing research on that.
Like, I was shocked by what I found. Like you said, 93%. That blew my mind.
I would have thought it was less than 5%.
So to hear it's that overwhelmingly large of a majority of, you know, the top websites in the world,
that's so crazy.
So let's get into a couple of things you guys got going on.
Let's talk briefly about the Cartesi staking.
Like, tell us about the staking and the delegation and where that all stands right now.
Right.
So the Cartesi staking system is part of this bigger project called Noether.
It's going to be a sidechain.
We're also developing a sidechain aside from the rollups.
It's coming next year.
But the proof-of-stake system is a milestone for this.
It was launched in December last year.
And-- but, you know, people needed to run their own nodes in order to stake.
- And that's highly inconvenient for most people. - Right.
So what we are doing now is to allow people to create staking pools
and allowing delegation.
So if you are a CTSI holder, you can stake your CTSI on any pool of your choice.
- So that's a great thing that people have been waiting for. - Yeah.
Yeah. And like you said, there's a high learning curve. We're actually--
we're setting up a Cardano staking pool right now.
And it's--
It's a lot to set those up.
So we got people here a lot smarter than me having to do it because I couldn't even figure it out.
I wouldn't know where to start.
So I think the fact that can people can, you know, choose their pool and stake there,
I think that definitely is, you know, a big benefit to the Cartesi holders.
Now, let's talk-- you guys have something pretty exciting going on,
and something I love is poker.
So I'm a Texas Hold'em poker player.
I played in the WSOP a good bit.
This year in November, I'm actually going out to the main event.
It'll be the first time I've ever played the main event for the World Series of Poker.
And, you know, of course, I'm going to bring it home for crypto, of course.
But I want to know, you guys have some really exciting stuff going on in the world of poker,
so kind of tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing,
and, you know, we can take it from there.
Sure. So--
Having poker-- decentralized poker was not an easy problem.
- It is not an easy problem to do-- - Yeah.
implement that on blockchains.
You have all the privacy issues.
You have to conceal your cards.
So we took poker because it's a fantastic demonstration of what our technology can do
because, you know, there are some algorithms that allow people to shuffle cards in a decentralized way.
It's called the Mental Poker. This thing exists for many years.
There is an implementation that already runs on Linux.
Like, standard software that runs on Linux.
So we can take that entire piece and run on Cartesi.
On our virtual machine.
And so, if you wanted to do that in Solidity, that would be very hard, right?
We'd have to implement the whole thing.
It would be hell.
So we can just take something that exists and show how we can solve that.
But there is more.
We can also have the entire process of poker fully automated with Cartesi,
and even if there is, let's say, a dispute resolution, everything settle automatically
with the Cartesi nodes and the blockchain.
There is no human intervention, so it's automatic from beginning to end.
Yeah. And I've always said, like, to be honest with you,
one of the things that got me super interested in blockchain, among many others, was poker
because I just saw, like, online, you never feel like it's fair.
You know, when you're playing online poker.
There's a site.
I can't--
Global Poker, I think it is. I can't remember exactly what the name of it is now.
I haven't played in a few years.
But you always felt like if the one card you didn't need to come out
that it was going to come out, and you would go and you would research on forums,
in that specific website,
there's so many complaints about that one specific thing,
about how the variance is so much higher on there than other places.
And so you just never felt like it was fair and that they could always rig it in their way.
And, you know, I think blockchain can make online poker and online gaming
and all kinds of things much more fair,
and it sounds like that's something that you guys have seen.
But I thought like, "Oh, somebody just come out with blockchain poker, and it would be really easy."
I know WINk from Tron, they actually had put out one before,
and it was kind of like--
It was okay. I played there a little bit.
But to see this and to see the development and how many years it's taken,
it certainly has surprised me.
And I guess it's just a super complicated problem to try to solve to make things fair.
Is that what you guys have seen?
Exactly. And, you know,
you have to rely on the random number from your online poker platform
- that's, you know, data is not being shown to someone. - Exactly.
And you never know, right?
But with the poker that we developed,
there is no way that Cartesi or anyone can tamper with the system.
And the shuffling?
You don't have to rely on any central authority creating the random number to shuffle the cards.
It's just like split among the players themselves.
They participate in shuffling together with their own keys, right?
- So it's really tamper-proof. - Yeah. I love it. I think it's super exciting.
So as far as you guys go at Cartesi,
you know, are you guys, like, looking for developers?
How can people get more involved with the Cartesi ecosystem?
Outside of just investing in the project.
Well, we are growing very fast.
We are hiring right now,
selecting candidates, expanding the team,
you know, we want to take what is like--
we have rollups coming to testnet right now.
We've started to release coding articles explaining these things to the community.
Then we're going to have all these path till the end of the year
to make things more and more convenient, more and more stable.
And throughout this time, we are also inviting people to try and develop stuff on Cartesi.
We have Cartesi Labs,
which is this ecosystem funding program that we have.
We have grants.
So if people go to Cartesi Labs website,
they'll see what they can do.
We incentivize people in different ways.
Right? So not only are we hiring,
but we're also giving grants and incentives and mentorship
and all the help we can to make this ecosystem grow.
Yeah. I'm excited. Like I said, I don't think I'm underselling it.
I believe that you guys are going to be one of the most successful projects out there.
I mean, I can definitely see you guys getting up in the top 30, 40, maybe top 20 in altcoins
because I know the work you guys are doing on the backend.
You guys are innovating.
When the mainnet comes out, it's going to be super exciting. So,
Erick, I've definitely enjoyed having you on the show today.
Is there anything you want to leave us with today?
Yeah. So I think it's important to reiterate the message, right?
That the mission here is that, you know, developing for blockchains is hard.
People have to learn a new language which they are limited by several factors.
And the initial dream of Ethereum was to create this world computer,
this decentralized computer,
but at this moment, we're still very far from that.
And we want to push it much, much closer to a real computer.
We want to give people this computational power.
We want to give people this mainstream software environment
that they can use software they already use out there.
So we really expect to open the gates for developers and really foster the ecosystem with our tech.
- That's why we're super excited and working hard. - Yeah. I can relate to that.
So, alright. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
And everybody watching, you guys make sure to leave your comments down below.
I'm very curious to see what you guys think about Cartesi.
Can it pass Polygon?
You know, what other projects are you excited about?
Make sure to drop that down below and let me know, do you like to play poker?
Alright, guys. That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.