1. What about blockchain, Ethereum or own?
I think Cartesi will have its own Blockchain instead of using the Ethereum blockchain and so far the project hasn't announced their tokens so we're waiting for the update and what happens after the project launches its blockchain.
Hopefully this will happen because if use the private blockchain, this project will be more interested by investors and certainly this is what the development team needs when starting the project.
For me, using ETH blockchain is too old and should not use this platform anymore because most new projects have a very low success rate when using this platform.
Cartesi's first blockchain implementation is on Ethereum. But it can work on top of any public blockchain supporting smart contracts. It is blockchain-agnostic. In fact, it’s also agnostic to the consensus mechanism, being able to rely on Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, some BFT variant or some kind of quorum.
Our objective is to provide a much better computational layer for DApps. In that sense, the computation is moved off-chain, outside of the consensus layer. The latter being only used to guarantee consensus and security.
Cartesi is a platform for decentralized computation. In that sense, looking at Cartesi as a computer, the correct metric should be “Instructions per Second” (in the same way we would measure the power of CPU’s). The processing throughput (instructions per second) allowed by Cartesi is orders of magnitude of what can be emulated on-chain, allowing for an experience much closer to what we have on Web2.0 while preserving decentralization.
(That being said, any improvement on TPS on the base layer helps Cartesi to perform even better). Finally, as Cartesi can connect to different blockchains it will be a powerful tool for interoperability and securely transferring data and value across chains.
For example, a way in which Cartesi can enhance the power of Ethereum is to give future contracts the ability to read any data on the current state of the blockchain. It is currently not possible for a smart contract to read the balance of another account, or to read the storage of another contract (unless explicitly exposed on interfaces created by their developers).