Raiden Pulse #15: News from November 2020 — January 2021

With all the challenges 2020 brought, we did our best to keep up with the changing world. Despite being unable to travel and interact with people offline, we took part in multiple online events, developed several demos, and made significant progress towards the light client mainnet release.

Due to Christmas holidays and vacations, this summary covers all things that happened in Raiden in the past 3 months. Next time we’ll be back on track and publish a bi-monthly summary. The main focus since November was to improve the overall stability and speed of the Raiden Python client and get closer to the mainnet release of the light client. Let’s dig in!

General Updates

Raiden Client:

• Released Raiden v1.2.0 — Tristan da Cunha: This adds Matrix “toDevice” message support in the transport layer, thus reducing the messaging overhead. Furthermore, it introduces support for capabilities. This means that the Raiden client can show its capabilities to other clients via its Matrix profile.
• WebRTC works between Light Client and Python Client: This results in faster transfers between all supported Raiden clients.
• More work on the transport layer: Work has been put into reducing the size of the Matrix DB. We’re still experiencing some bugs on the transport layer, which has resulted in a good amount of debugging.
• Preparing for the v1.3.0 release: We are working towards the next mainnet release of the Raiden Client. The release will be named “Bespin”. Many bug fixes are included and a major feature will be better sync times for mainnet, which will result in a big UX/UI improvement.

Raiden Light Client:

• New Raiden Light Client SDK, dApp and CLI Release. This minor release fixes many of the remaining issues towards a mainnet release. The SDK now uses an adaptive syncing mechanism that works with slower nodes and provides partner suggestions from the pathfinding service. The dApp provides partner suggestions in the UI and got many fixes for smaller paper cuts. Another important addition is the usage of the browser cache to make the dApp usable without access to our servers. You can check out the link to the release to learn more.

Other Updates: The demos mentioned in the previous blog post were finalized. One of them explains how to do IoT machine to machine (M2M) micro payments using Raiden. You can see how fast ERC-20 token transfers can be and get a general overview of the setup. In the other demo we explain how to build a paywall infrastructure on top of Raiden. You can see that with Raiden it’s easy to monetize online content like newspaper articles efficiently without the need for user accounts or a subscription-based payment model.

Raiden Trust: Flows Finance previously known as Ouro Payments is a new project that has been approved by the Raiden Trust. Flows Finance is a privacy-preserving protocol allowing real-time access to finance. Anyone can easily sign up and create a continuous payment stream, whether paying a continuous subscription or receiving your salary in real-time. Their own announcement of the grant can be found here.

Make sure to check out the Raiden Trust website if you’re interested in building something cool on top of Raiden!

Weekly Development Updates: in 2020 u/BOR4 and u/Mat7ias have done a great job and there was not a single week without a Raiden Weekly Update! If you are interested in getting more details about the project, 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.

Events

• On January 28th, Dominik gave a presentation at the Hello Digital Money event. He talked about how payment channels work and explained the Raiden settlement algorithm. This event was a great opportunity to better understand the full potential of different payment tools and how to apply them to different scenarios and projects. You can watch the full video here.
• We are sponsoring the Encode University hackathon that started in November. The hackathon is scheduled to end at the beginning of February, and we plan to share the winners in the next Raiden Pulse.

What’s up next?

• We are currently planning the events and hackathons that we want to participate in 2021. If you would like to share your ideas or events you participate in, don’t hesitate to leave a comment under this post.
• Please make sure to follow us on Twitter for more announcements on upcoming events.

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.