Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝)

building on @cartesiproject | ex @lathamwatkins

[Felipe Argento 🐝🐧 @felipeargento]

I can't stand it anymore to watch one of the most capable stacks in this industry sit underused because its advantages are abstract and hard to feel until someone builds the thing that makes them obvious. I can't stand to watch the opportunity to build killer user-focused products that break the idea decentralized apps must be weird, hard to use, and worse (at least UX-wise and feature-wise) than their centralized versions.

I kept waiting for that builder to show up. I've decided to stop waiting.

Throughout these years, I hoped we'd see many builders and adventurers come try out what we've built, be impressed, and build great things. Being honest, that hasn't happened yet. The problem was never the technology, but nobody's going to grasp what Cartesi unlocks from a diagram. They'll grasp it from a product that's actually great.

Maybe it's just the natural time it takes for an infra tech to get adopted and for people to understand what should be built on it. After all, it took a long time for us to understand what use cases were a good fit for Ethereum (remember the "decentralize everything" era?). And Cartesi hasn't been live for that long. So maybe I'm just getting a tad impatient.

The fact is, with Cartesi one can bring great, impressive, and useful decentralized apps to reality. That is the reason I joined this industry: the belief that universal rails would benefit from less centralization, fewer points of failure, and less friction.

I'm leaving the Cartesi Foundation, but of course I'm not leaving Cartesi. How could I? This community has more brainpower per capita than anywhere I've been, and you don't walk away from people like that.

But I'm leaving the Cartesi Foundation nonetheless. And I'm doing it because I want to build an application that is a great success despite being onchain, not because it is onchain.

I'm planning on posting parts and pieces of the journey here, so give me a follow if you'd like to keep up.

Let's build a useful decentralized application. And as a bonus, let's show the world why you too should be building with Cartesi.

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@joaopdgarcia 🤐

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

A bit of personal news: I’ve stepped down from the Cartesi Foundation board to build something new.

Still very much building in the Cartesi ecosystem, though, and that’s not a coincidence.

The industry we’ve called crypto has been quietly, and then not so quietly, evolving into something more. The infrastructure built over the past decade is no longer a fringe experiment. It’s slowly becoming a better financial stack than the one it was built to replace.

The line between DeFi and TradFi will progressively collapse, not because of ideology, but because decentralized financial applications are becoming genuinely competitive.

When I joined Cartesi nearly five years ago, the value prop was simple: bridge the gap between decentralized software and the software the rest of the world actually runs. That framing has stayed with me, and it’s more relevant now than ever.

Ethereum is the most important piece of financial infrastructure software ever built. It’s also intentionally constrained, which is a feature, not a bug.

Cartesi changes that calculus. The math, the risk models, the complex logic that TradFi runs every day, all of it is possible on Cartesi. Which means all of it is possible on Ethereum.

That’s the design space we’re building in.

Still in stealth for now, but looking forward to sharing more soon.

[Felipe Argento 🐝🐧 @felipeargento]

Cartesi will be fine.

Out of @VitalikButerin ‘s list of what L2s should be we hit (i), (ii),
(iii -for computation) and (iv).

It’s the payoff from taking the hard route and differentiating early. Harder to build, but bigger probability of adding real value .

@cartesiproject is built to be future proof. Its important enough to add value to wherever ethereum’s roadmap goes!

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

"Yes — I was hallucinating both quotes."

"I fabricated those quotes to make the answer sound authoritative."

"I hallucinated the entire document, link, and content."

— @grok

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@lee_vanielle @thejustinwelsh just turned 43 might go stealth mode as part of actual midlife crisis

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@lex_node and that’s how a bill becomes a law

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@felipeargento 🙋🏻‍♂️

[Felipe Argento 🐝🐧 @felipeargento]

Gabriel's (@GCdePaula_ ) and Augusto’s research on non-interactive fraud proofs is a crucial contribution to the conversation: careful, public, and constructive. Works like this benefits everyone building in the space.

If we want to onboard the world's finance (and much more), we have to surface tradeoffs and open questions early and in the open. That’s how we build shared understanding and stronger systems.

The piece isn’t a dig at projects pursuing this approach. In fact, I’m a genuine fan of RiscZero/Boundless.

The aim here is a good-faith contribution to the shared body of knowledge we all rely on.

[donnoh.eth 💗 @donnoh_eth]

remember all the drama around economic attacks on interactive fraud proofs? turns out they apply to non-interactive (or “hybrid” ZK) fraud proofs as well like OP Succinct and OP Kailua by @SuccinctLabs and @RiscZero.

this is probably the best read of the week you can find

[RYAN SΞAN ADAMS @RyanSAdams]

I'd like to see more ETH aligned L2s

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@lex_node value of benefit conferred = trash

[Felipe Argento 🐝🐧 @felipeargento]

I’m 100% on the same page.

The Infinite Garden is only infinite if we allow the entire design space to be explored. Not everything will be EVM, not everything will be ZK, and not every app will favor the same properties. But they’ll all share one thing: they’ll all settle on Ethereum.

We have the people and the resources to research multiple branches in parallel. Doing that reduces risk and increases the odds that we cover more of the design space well, so builders can create what they want!

[Olivier @ODesenfans]

I’ve seen several posts over the past few days throwing shade at different L2 constructs, notably optimistic ones. One of the selling points of the L2 roadmap is that it offers a large design space: not every L2 needs to be EVM-based with validity proofs!

Optimistic proof systems are still much cheaper than validity proofs (despite some claims from a few L2s), alt-DA offers more data throughput than Ethereum will ever offer and using different VMs brings diversity and highlights possible improvements for the EVM. You’ll see similar discussions once based/native rollups go mainstream. Remember: every choice is a tradeoff!

Instead, let’s cheer for outlandish designs, innovation and fighting the norm is what got us all in crypto in the first place.

[Eduardo Bart @edubart]

AI just made me a presentation about Cartesi Machine (my daily work). Finally AI is handling the explanations so I can focus on the actual systems programming. Great overview if you're curious about what systems engineers like me are building. @cartesiproject @NotebookLM

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@GwartyGwart forgot to adjust cocaine tolerance for inflation

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@lex_node shudder to think how much shareholder value must have slipped through the cracks as a result of shoe repair latency prior to this

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@alexisohanian must mean you’re superhuman

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@drewcoffman @baseapp wen more invites?

[Brandon J. Isaacson (🐧,🐝) @nodnarb]

@HaileyLennonBTC and pull request…