Cartesi PRT Fraud-Proof Reinforces Ethereum Stage 2 Rollup Preparation

Last week, a detailed review was provided on L2BEAT's reclassification and its implications for Ethereum rollups. The focus now shifts to Cartesi's response to this upgraded standard: the introduction of the PRT (Permissionless Refereed Tournaments) fraud-proof mechanism that advances the Cartesi Rollups SDK to Stage 2. PRT is Cartesi's initial solution to the challenge of verifying transition states in a decentralized, Sybil-resistant manner without relying on significant resources or trust assumptions. Unlike older models, PRT does not depend on permissioned verifiers and offers scalable verification from honest validators while minimizing their burden. PRT operates using commitment hashes for the entire computation path, not just the final state, enabling it to expose false statements and dishonest behavior efficiently. Dispute resolution is managed through an elimination tournament, where validators in teams have half their claims eliminated each round, ensuring logarithmic scaling of effort and resilience against large Sybil attacks with modest hardware. Initially launched alongside an improved Honeypot, the economic model for PRT is not yet integrated, and the system remains vulnerable to delay attacks, making it unsuitable for high TVL applications at the moment. Nonetheless, it represents a critical step toward the deployment of Cartesi’s Stage 2 Rollup and aligns with the new standards set by L2BEAT.