Raiden Pulse #12: News from May and June

We’re halfway through 2020, which means it’s time for a new bi-monthly summary of all things Raiden: overall development progress, product updates, (virtual) event participation and all the other stuff that we’ve been up to in May and June. In May we reached a major milestone as we released the long awaited Alderaan version. More on this and other interesting news later in the update. Let’s dig into what’s new with Raiden!

Development Updates towards Alderaan mainnet

The main goal for May and June was to release Alderaan with the Raiden Service Bundle and the corresponding version of the Raiden Wizard. On May 26th Alderaan was released together with the RSB and the Raiden Wizard. A couple of weeks later, the team followed up with a new release that fixed a couple of minor bugs and more importantly introduced an all new WebUI. It’s safe to say that May and June were busy, but also successful months. While all of this happened, the light client team continued working towards reaching feature parity with the Python client so that the light client can also be released on the mainnet. All in all, two exciting months are behind us, and two exciting months are ahead of us!

General Updates

• Raiden Client: As already mentioned, the overarching achievement for the Raiden Client over the last two months was the release of Aldreraan on the Ethereum mainnet. The release is covered in detail in this blogpost and we encourage everyone to read it in order to get an overview of all the cool new features. Along with the Alderaan release, we also introduced a bug bounty program that can be found in detail here. Last but not least, a couple of weeks after the initial release, the team made a second release that fixed some minor bugs and introduced an all new WebUI. The WebUI serves as a reference wallet integration, but it’s also a convenient tool for people to interact with their Raiden node. More information about the new WebUI is available here. Furthermore, the team has been working on making a PoC for using WebRTC for the transport layer in Raiden. Initial benchmarks show significant improvements of the time it takes for transfers to be performed.
• Raiden Light Client: The team is working full speed ahead to reach feature parity with the Python client. The goal of doing this is to release the light client version of Raiden on the mainnet. Smoke testing on mainnet has already begun and further mainnet testing is in the preparation phase. An interesting feature to highlight is that the light client can now also receive payments with monitoring services enabled.
• Raiden Trust: A second round of grant reviews has taken place and we are happy to announce that the Raiden Trust decided to award a grant to Hub20. For more details on the grant and Hub20 check out this announcement. We hope to see more applications in the future that will help grow the Raiden ecosystem as well as the decentralized vision as a whole.
• Raiden WebUI: As already mentioned, the Raiden WebUI had an entire redesign and was released together with Raiden v1.1.0. For an in-depth update on what’s new in the WebUI check this blogpost.
• Weekly development updates: u/BOR4 and u/Mat7ias have, as usual, put in an amazing effort and continued to consistently create the weekly updates about Raiden. If you are interested in more detailed development updates, please make sure to follow the weekly updates on development progress and other activities posted on Reddit by u/BOR4 or u/Mat7ias with the [GIT] label.

People

Thomas has left the Raiden team in order to seek new opportunities. Thank you very much for the work you put in and we wish you all the best in the future. To fill the gap that Thomas left behind, we are very happy to have Thore joining the team.

Events

• Dominik presented at CogX 2020: https://youtu.be/ek0ljIeACLo
• We sponsored the Protect Privacy Gitcoin hackathon starting on June 15th and Jacob did a workshop there: https://youtu.be/YCsxbBbb85s

What’s up next?

• The team has been analyzing the Reddit Scaling Bake-Off challenge and has decided to use the opportunity as a learning experience in order to build a demo that fulfills the requirements for the challenge. This means that the team will be dedicating most of their time in July to work on this.
• Please make sure to follow our Twitter feed for more announcements on upcoming events.

Join our team!

Looking for a new challenge? If you want to be part of an open ecosystem right at the technological frontier and happen to be as excited about payment channel networks as we are, please have a look at the open positions and apply or feel free to refer somebody.

All the best,

The Raiden Team

Make sure to stay up to date by following us on Twitter and Medium and joining the conversations on Reddit and Gitter!

The Raiden project is led by brainbot labs Est.

Disclaimer: Please note, that even though we do our best to ensure the quality and accuracy of the information provided, this publication may contain views and opinions, errors and omissions for which the content creator(s) and any represented organization cannot be held liable.

The wording and concepts regarding financial terminology (e.g. “payments”, “checks”, “currency”, “transfer” [of value]) are exclusively used in an exemplary way to describe technological principles and do not necessarily conform to the real world or legal equivalents of these terms and concepts.