January’s Spotlight: Meet Cartesi (CTSI)

There have been various fundraising mechanisms in the cryptocurrency space that gained and then fell out of popularity over the years.

Starting with ICOs (initial coin offerings), moving to IEOs (initial exchange offerings), and now IDOs (initial DEX offerings), the way in which projects raise funds has continued to evolve.

Although currently ICOs are almost unheard of and IEOs are taking place much less frequently, there have been quite a few projects that got their starts as IEOs and have become massively successful. For example, Elrond and Matic both now have market caps in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Elrond over $500 million, and communities that genuinely believe in the project and help it grow.

Meet Cartesi

These projects are fundamentally different from one another, but one thing they share in common is that they both held their IEOs on Binance Launchpad, the highly vetted and respected token launch platform.

Matic and Elrond have grown extensively, but another Binance Launchpad IEO should not be overlooked: Cartesi.

Cartesi is a platform built to help scale Ethereum applications, and within just a few hours of the token launch, its native CTSI token was up over 400%.

As of writing these lines, CTSI is trading at $0.052 with a market cap of approximately $11 million, according to CoinGecko.

Many layer-two protocol solutions are trying to improve Ethereum’s scalability problems and transaction fees, but most are challenging for developers to interact with.

Cartesi allows for decentralized application and smart contract developers to code with mainstream software, such as Linux OS resources, an upgrade to most layer-two offerings. Allowing for an easier transition between code from Ethereum to a layer-two scaling protocol is a major competitive advantage that Cartesi has been able to achieve, and also serves as a fantastic starting point for non-blockchain-based coders and developers.

The Proof-of-Stake Advantage

With Cartesi’s goal of making decentralized applications and smart contracts easier to develop, the project needs a community willing to provide security and verify transactions on the network. Cartesi has implemented one of the most efficient ways to reward network verifiers for participating in transaction verification, using a version of Proof-of-Stake.

With Proof-of-Stake, network users can dedicate tokens as collateral on the network, or ‘stake’ their tokens, in order to verify transactions and act as a potential punishment as deterrence to bad actors.

Cartesi. Source: Cartesi official website

This is an improvement on the original blockchain verification method, Proof-of-Work, because Proof-of-Work verification usually requires specialized computing equipment and large amounts of energy consumption. With Cartesi, users can stake their CTSI tokens directly from their PCs without the need for specialized equipment and be proportionally rewarded for validating the current block of transactions.

The CTSI Token

CTSI is the utility token behind the Cartesi platform. It works as the fuel that powers the blockchain, covering staking and network fees.

If a user thinks the network’s currency will gain value over time, staking is a great way for them to passively earn a yield on a stake that would normally be dormant. CTSI is among a growing number of projects that are enabling stakers to take part in and benefit from network security. Each user has an equal likelihood to be chosen to verify the next block proportional to their stake, forming a fair system for the network and its users.

With Cartesi’s PoS Noether sidechain for data availability having launched last month, the stage is set for the Ethereum scaling solution to shine in 2021. Should it realize its true potential, Cartesi can be added to the growing list of Binance IEOs that started small before going stratospheric.