The Cartesi Foundation is directing more of its engineering and business development efforts toward supporting Knoss, an independent derivatives exchange being built on Cartesi Rollups. The aim is to prove Cartesi under real commercial conditions and demonstrate how its capabilities can translate into a competitive financial application with real market potential.
We have funded the initial development of Knoss, which is independently run, while our infrastructure priorities focus on the reliability, verification, and fund-recovery requirements of financial applications.
What we learned
For years, the Foundation funded teams, improved tooling, and supported developers exploring what Cartesi could make possible. That work helped advance the technology and gave us confidence in the technical thesis behind it.
Over time, it became clearer that technical advantage alone had less influence on adoption than we expected. We saw access to a more capable execution environment as a strong reason for developers to build on Cartesi. In practice, the traction of pre-existing networks where users, liquidity, and distribution already existed played a much bigger role in their decisions.
That learning has informed a more deliberate concentration of effort around a commercial product. Working closely with a product as it develops allows its requirements to feed directly into the infrastructure, creating a much tighter connection between what Cartesi can enable and what is actually needed in practice.
What we are building on
Cartesi is Ethereum L2 infrastructure with a distinct execution model. Applications have dedicated computational capacity and can run conventional software inside a reproducible Linux environment, with incorrect execution challenged through disputes resolved on Ethereum. This makes it possible to work with software and computation that would be difficult to accommodate within a conventional smart contract environment.
That technical foundation has advanced significantly over years of development. Matching engines, risk models, numerical libraries and conventional software stacks can all operate within an environment where execution remains verifiable. We are now directing more of that development towards the requirements of financial applications and have discontinued several parallel initiatives. More details are available on our Technical Plan.
Cartesi remains open source and general purpose. Improvements developed through this work remain available to other applications and are not limited to Knoss.
Why back an exchange
An exchange puts the execution model to work in an environment where its capabilities and reliability have direct consequences for the product. Matching orders, calculating margin, and managing risk all depend on software that needs to perform accurately and consistently.
Cartesi allows developers to implement that logic using conventional programming languages and numerical libraries in an independently reproducible environment. The opportunity is to apply that flexibility to a product operating under real-world demands and give traders a reason to choose it.
A derivatives exchange also places demanding requirements on the surrounding infrastructure, from responsive trading and reliable settlement to mechanisms that allow users to recover funds when something goes wrong. Building against those requirements gives our technical work a practical proving ground under real operating conditions.
Introducing Knoss
Knoss is being built by Felipe Argento, Danilo Tuler, Pedro Argento, Eduardo Barthel, and Brandon Isaacson, who have stepped away from the Cartesi core team to build on Cartesi full-time. They bring direct knowledge of the technology and how its capabilities can be applied in a real-world commercial product.
The Knoss team operates through a separate corporate structure, independently of the Cartesi Foundation, with responsibility for its own product and operations. That separation is deliberate: a successful derivatives exchange benefits from the ability to move quickly, make its own commercial decisions, and raise capital on its own terms.
The Foundation supports Knoss through initial grant funding and work on the underlying infrastructure. Our responsibility is to advance Cartesi’s technology and its long-term development. The agreement between the two organizations also establishes how Knoss’s commercial activity can contribute financially to that work.
The economics
The Foundation has funded the initial development of Knoss through a grant. Under the agreement, the Foundation holds a contractual right to 25% of Knoss’s net revenues, after essential operating and growth costs.
Any revenue received by the Foundation will support further development of Cartesi technology and future business development. This creates a direct route through which commercial use of Cartesi can contribute back to the ecosystem, subject to Knoss’s commercial success.
For now, that economic relationship is between Knoss and the Foundation. Any future evolution of CTSI’s utility or economics would be considered separately, with the mechanism clearly defined and subject to the applicable governance process.
What you can expect from us
Our technical work is centred on completing the integrated Rollups and fraud-proof stack, with security testing and hardening as key priorities. We will report technical progress through the Technical Plan and our regular updates, and will disclose revenue received under the Knoss agreement together with how those funds are used.
Knoss will communicate its product progress, launch plans, and commercial milestones directly through @knoss_xyz. The Knoss team is responsible for decisions relating to the product, including launch timelines and commercial projections.
Follow the work shaping Cartesi’s infrastructure and the priorities behind it.
Explore the Technical Plan
