Raiden Pulse #14: News from September & October
We are happy to share a new bi-monthly summary of all things that happened in Raiden: overall development progress, product updates, (virtual) event participation, and all the other stuff that we’ve been up to in September and October. The main focus of the last two months was to improve overall stability and speed of the Raiden full client and to get closer to the mainnet release of the light client. We’re still patiently waiting to see the evaluation of the Reddit Scaling challenge and will share information as soon there’s something to share. Let’s dig in!
General Updates
Raiden Client:
- WebRTC for the Python client: Most of our efforts were put into continuing work on implementing WebRTC along with some general stability fixes. The main work for WebRTC is done and it now needs some testing and benchmarking as well as making sure it’s compatible with the light client. From the preliminary testing we have done so far, we see significant improvements in the time it takes to do payments.
- Stability: On the stability side, we have upgraded the Matrix version and optimized message deliveries with toDevice messages.
- Reduce sync time: Another big improvement to the user experience that we have worked on is to reduce the sync time on the first startup of Raiden. The feature is not yet merged into master, but we see less than a minute sync times now compared to days. We have also entirely removed internal routing, since it gave worse results than the PFS. However, direct transfers are still possible without using the PFS.
- Cross Token Payments, Windows support: Furthermore work on some new features such as Cross Token Network Payments (CTNP) and Windows support has also been started.
Raiden Light Client: The main focus of the last two months was to continue to prepare the light client for mainnet launch. We made the v0.12.0 — Axolotl release, which had many stability improvements along with a bunch of improvements to the light client front end dApp.
Other Updates: We put some effort into making some tools that make it easy and convenient for people to try out Raiden. An example of this is try.raiden.network, which you can read a blogpost about here.
We also put some effort into adding Goerli support to the Raiden Wizard. This means that it’s now very easy to use the Raiden Wizard to set up a full Raiden node on the Goerli testnet, when you want to get started building on Raiden.
Lastly, we started working on some demos that showcase some potential use cases of Raiden. We look forward to sharing them with you in the near future.
Raiden Trust: The Raiden Trust is currently reviewing a new round of applications. We look forward to hopefully sharing some interesting new grantees soon. If you’re interested in learning more about the Raiden Trust and how to apply for a grant, you can read more here.
Weekly development updates: as always, u/BOR4 and u/Mat7ias, have 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
In September, Augusto, one of the longest standing team members, left the project to seek new challenges. We want to thank him for all his work and all the good times we’ve had with him and we wish him all the best in the future. Jochen also left in September and we want to thank him as well for his work and good times and wish him good luck in the future.
On the positive side, we finally have a new comms manager for the project. We would like to welcome Mirtsa to the team. We look forward to working with her and to get all the help we can to help spread the word about Raiden. Moreover, we are happy to welcome Jakob and Anton who joined the project as working students.
Events
- We participated in a panel discussion on DeFi’s scaling problem at BlockDown 2020, you can check it out here
- Dominik gave a presentation for Ethereum Engineering Group on how Raiden enables low latency, linearly scalable, cheap token transfers. Here is the video of the talk
- @vdWijden won the #ETHOnline prize for the best hack to utilize Raiden to scale payments! To learn more about the project, click here
What’s up next?
- We are sponsoring the Encode University hackathon that starts this November
- 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
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.
