Cartesi and the IOTA Foundation Partner to Accelerate Smart Contract Adoption for IoT

With IOTA Oracles, IOTA Smart Contracts and Cartesi’s Linux based virtual machine, the two groups will bring non-blockchain based use cases and businesses into the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), Gaming, NFTs, and industrial IoT.

We are excited to announce our formal partnership with Cartesi, an organization committed to introducing mainstream software stacks (e.g. Linux VM) to the world of distributed ledger technology and smart contracts. As part of this partnership, we will work closely together over the coming months with the objective of accelerating the development and adoption of IOTA Smart Contracts, and to integrate the Cartesi VM as an official VM option for IOTA dApps.

With both networks and communities officially partnering, we hope to expand the user base of popular Decentralised Finance (DeFi) use cases such as Automated Market makers (AMMs), gaming, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Oracles, while strengthening IOTA’s ability to offer decentralized technologies to corporations using common technology stacks.

One of the key goals of the IOTA Foundation has always been to bridge the divide between real world applications and blockchain technology. Many of the solutions available today suffer from key design constraints that prohibit wide-scale adoption outside of the well known ‘crypto applications’ we see popular today.

With IOTA, we’ve designed tools, architecture, and software that allow corporations to leverage decentralized technologies with little friction and minimal overhead. With our focus on standardization, the IOTA protocol is living up to its promise of delivering on the concept of ‘permissionless innovation’, with organizations using our technology, including us in cutting edge research, or referencing us in industrial patents independent from any outreach by the IOTA Foundation.

The IOTA Foundation and Cartesi stand well-aligned in vision: Cartesi is working to close the gap between the mainstream software world and blockchains. This gap has been a huge impediment for the broad adoption the industry has been longing for. Blockchains typically work under such resource scarcity that using a real operating system has been so far out of the question. But without an operating system, blockchain applications cannot benefit from the past decades of worldwide software development. Instead, mainstream developers are left with a frustrating landscape.

The Cartesi team has been close to the IOTA Foundation's team since its inception, with Serguei Popov playing a crucial role in the foundation of the project. With this partnership now officially announced, we hope to further leverage the extensive experience Cartesi has in the field of smart contracts, and jointly work on accelerating the development of the IOTA Smart Contract Protocol. Ultimately, our objective is to integrate the Cartesi VM into ISCP to offer developers the ability to use Linux and the countless software components that are supported by it. This will bring IOTA and Cartesi a suit of powerful mainstream tools for developers and engineers familiar with the traditional software industry.

Over the coming months, we aim to expand on two key areas that are valuable to both organizations and our ecosystems:

• Cartesi Linux Virtual Machine added as a custom VM for IOTA Smart Contracts (ISCP). That will allow developers to create smart contracts with mainstream software components. With greater expressive power and an environment that is familiar to most developers in the world, that will bring about new powerful opportunities in  DeFi, Gaming, NFT's and more. The Cartesi Linux Virtual Machine will also be a powerful tool for corporate and enterprise adoption for both communities.
• IOTA Oracles: By integrating IOTA Oracles to Cartesi's computational oracle, corporate servers and smart devices will be able to check data integrity and provenance and execute verifiable batch processings. That will add even more transparency and security to industrial systems leveraging Cartesi’s blockchain technology and Linux Virtual Machine.

This announcement represents a continuation of our commitment to build bridges with like minded organizations who we believe are contributing to the forward movement of the industry.  We hope our communities will come together to innovate and build exciting tools that expand the global footprint of decentralized technologies.

"Cartesi was honored to receive its very first investment from Serguei Popov, who is our technical advisor and also co-author and friends with Augusto Teixeira. From the early days, Cartesi and the IOTA Foundation have been exchanging thoughts and studying the best ways to collaborate. After several technical meetings over the last years, we see an integration path forward that will bring tremendous opportunities for DeFi, Gaming, NFT and industrial IoT." - Erick de Moura, CEO at Cartesi

“IOTA’s value proposition has always been to grow outside the traditional world of blockchain. Since the inception of the project, we have sought out partners and like-minded individuals who share this same vision for distributed ledger technology and decentralized applications. It is with this in mind that we are excited to announce our partnership with Cartesi, one of the leaders at the forefront of bridging the gap between blockchain and the traditional world. We look forward to having Cartesi’s VM running on ISCP as well as IOTA Oracles available to another popular blockchain ecosystem.” - Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder of the IOTA Foundation

About Cartesi

Cartesi is taking smart contracts to the next level. It is a chain-agnostic layer-2 infrastructure,  solving the pressing problem of scalability on the most important blockchains. Most notably, Cartesi implements a unique Linux-supporting VM, rollups and side-chains to revolutionize the way developers create blockchain applications, allowing them to use mainstream software components.

About IOTA

The IOTA Foundation is a global not-for-profit foundation incorporated and headquartered in Germany. The IOTA Foundation's mission is to support the research and development of new distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including the IOTA Tangle. The Foundation encourages the education and adoption of distributed ledger technologies through the creation of ecosystems and the standardization of these new protocols.

The IOTA Tangle moves beyond blockchain by providing the world's first scalable, feeless and fully-decentralized distributed ledger technology. The Tangle uses its own unique technology to solve three fundamental problems with blockchain technology: high fees, scaling and centralization. It is an open-source protocol connecting the human economy with the machine economy by facilitating novel Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions, including secure data transfer, feeless micropayments, and secure access control for devices.