Hub20 — the latest grant

Meet our new grantee Hub20

We’re very excited to share with you that Hub20 is receiving a grant of $45’000 worth of RDN.

Hub20 is an open source, self-hosted web application that can interact with both Raiden and the “traditional” Ethereum blockchain to provide an easy-to-use payment gateway solution, allowing its operators to easily send and accept payments in ETH or any ERC20-token with near-zero fees. The possibility of having low-fee payments, irreversible transactions and the usage of stablecoins such as DAI (also supported by Raiden) all make Hub20 a very compelling offer for anyone that wants to receive payments online.

Hub20 also allows its operators to invite other users to join a hub, effectively turning any deployment of a Hub20 server into a “PayPal-like experience”: It allows users to keep an account with their own balance in different tokens and send/receive payments to anyone without having to know anything about the technical details of how it works. Hub20 finds the cheapest and fastest way to route a payment and uses it to complete the transfer. This may not be ideal for large deployments such as companies or cryptocurrency exchanges, because as for any service with custodial wallets, users need to trust the service operator. For a self-hosted solution, however, this is a far more acceptable trade-off: Hub operators and other users are more likely to know each other personally and the group can define how much of their own funds they want to expose to risks.

Most importantly, none of the users aside from the hub operators need to know any details about how to manage, secure and transact with cryptocurrency. The trade-off between trust/centralization for functionality/usability is what makes Hub20 an interesting proposition for non-experts and can help adoption of both crypto and especially the Raiden Network. A secondary benefit is that each Raiden node managed by a hub can pool the funds from different people, resulting in channels with more capacity and a healthier network.

In short, Hub20 will benefit the Raiden ecosystem as it will help to drive adoption by stripping away complexity for the end-user. Further, Hub20 nodes will tend to have more capacity and as such will be able to contribute to the Raiden Network with increased mediation capabilities.

You can follow and see the current status of the project here.

Apply for a grant yourself

Do you also want to build something that aligns with the Raiden ecosystem? Head over to https://www.raidentrust.li/ and apply! If you’re not quite sure what to build, but still want to help the ecosystem grow, check out some of the things we would like to see funded in our grant guidelines.

If you have any questions you can always reach us at contact [at] raidentrust.li