Erick de Moura is the co-founder of Cartesi and a board member of The Cartesi Foundation. With more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, his background spans software development, system architecture, and business strategy. Before founding Cartesi, Erick led teams and projects across a range of sectors, including healthtech, e-commerce, and infrastructure.
What role does the Cartesi Foundation play in supporting the ecosystem?
The Cartesi Foundation provides advisory and coordination support across various teams, grantees, and contributors, helping align them with the wider goals of the Cartesi project.
It also develops partnerships within the industry, organises hackathons and events, and assists with operational, legal, and administrative matters.
Additionally, it plays a governance role as Cartesi moves towards greater decentralisation.
How does the Dave fraud-proof system compare to other L2 systems, such as Optimism’s OPFP or Arbitrum’s BoLD?
According to L2Beat researchers, Dave is one of the most technically advanced fraud-proof systems currently available.
It is designed to maximise security and decentralisation, allowing any honest participant to prove fraudulent behaviour without requiring substantial capital or coordination.
In contrast, systems like Optimism and Arbitrum typically require defending parties to stake significant ETH to counter attacks.
Dave’s model makes large-scale attacks prohibitively expensive for malicious actors, enabling even low-resource validators to uphold network integrity.
This level of resilience is important to ensure L2s and app chains maintain the same decentralised principles as Ethereum.
How does Cartesi’s model of running each dApp on its own rollup with validators balance decentralisation with computational efficiency?
Traditional blockchains like Ethereum operate as if all applications share a single CPU, leading to congestion and high costs during periods of peak activity.
Cartesi addresses this by offering a model where each dApp runs on its own dedicated rollup, effectively giving each application its own CPU. This separation allows applications to avoid competing for resources, making computation more efficient and predictable in cost.
With Cartesi’s fraud-proof system, Dave, a single honest validator can enforce correct outcomes, preserving decentralisation without sacrificing performance.
What insights has the Honeypot security test provided after accumulating over 1.7m $CTSI?
The Honeypot was created to test the security of Cartesi Rollups by offering a financial incentive for white-hat and black-hat hackers to attempt exploits.
It gradually increased the amount of locked funds to make the challenge attractive, providing an open opportunity to identify any vulnerabilities in the protocol.
Although the funds could have been claimed if a critical flaw had been discovered, no successful exploits occurred. This result has strengthened confidence in the security design of Cartesi Rollups.
What were the main goals behind partnering with EigenLayer for Experiment Week #3, and what key takeaways did you get from the collab?
Experiment Weeks are meant to inspire innovation and help guide builders towards meaningful use cases.
While previous editions focused on internal development, this third iteration expanded to include collaboration with EigenLayer. The goal was to bring together two protocol communities and encourage cross-pollination of ideas.
The collaboration allowed both teams to explore new applications and deepen technical engagement, reinforcing the importance of proactive partnerships in pushing innovation.
What key learnings from 2024 will shape Cartesi’s strategic direction in 2025 and beyond?
Cartesi has been active since 2018, focusing early on areas like app-specific rollups, modularity, and alternative virtual machines — topics that only recently gained broader attention.
In 2024, the project reached a point of technological maturity, with a well-developed execution environment and fraud-proof infrastructure. A major takeaway from the past year has been the value of collaboration.
Working alongside partners like Avail, Espresso, and EigenLayer has provided new insights and helped integrate Cartesi’s technology with other web3 systems.
These experiences are shaping a strategy focused on interoperability and broader societal relevance.