Raiden Pulse #16: News from February — March

We’re back with another Raiden Pulse. This one covers all the things that happened in the Raiden project from February and March. The main focus areas of the last two months have been to refactor and fix the transport layer for the Python client and to prepare for mainnet release for both the clients. In the last two months, we also onboarded a couple of new devs to the team. All in all, things are looking good. Furthermore, we have some updates about the iBlockchain project. Learn more about this under “Other Updates”. Let’s dig in!

General Updates

Raiden Client: Most of the work done in the Python client is still focused on fixing Matrix bugs and refactoring of the transport layer. The main work has been:

• To reduce the load on the Matrix servers, messages are sent directly to services instead of going through the broadcast rooms in Matrix.
• It turned out that having many users in a room will cause problems even when they don’t send messages. So the next step is to avoid using the discovery room to distribute presence information. The team is fixing this in collaboration with Element, which is the company that develops Matrix.

Once these last things have been fixed, the plan is to move ahead with testing everything before making the Bespin release.

Raiden Light Client: The team made a new Light Client SDK, dApp and CLI release named The Supreme Archer. The main changes and new features of the release are listed here:

The SDK can now charge mediation fees: flat as well as proportional. The options are also included in the CLI.

• The user_deposit endpoint with the possibility of deposit, withdraw and planned_withdraw along with necessary changes in the SDK.
• Initial sync optimizations.
• Remove raiden transport through rooms and rely on toDevice and WebRTCchannels.
• Remove the SDK’s reliance on WebRTC so that the SDK will be fully functional in environments that do not support it, through the toDevice messages.
• Changes in various screens for the dapp to adapt it for full-fledged mobile usage.
• Additional services URLs can be passed as a list in the CLI as well as mentioning them more times through options passed to the — pathfindingServiceAddress .

Other than that, effort has been put into refactoring the SDK tests. This is a high level breakdown of what the team is working on accomplishing in the test refactoring:

• Rework e2e test and make them use-case based.
• Remove current integration tests and make some epics tests integration tests instead.
• Mock the Raiden class state machine.
• New unit tests in place for the epics that are now integration tests.

You can try out the latest release of the light client on the Goerli testnet right here: lightclient.raiden.network. Any feedback is highly appreciated!

Other Updates: We are excited to give a brief update of our efforts in the iBlockchain project. iBlockchain is a joint research project investigating IoT micropayments. The project is a collaboration between brainbot, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, with Bosch and NXP as industry partners.

The IoT economy is of special interest for Raiden, because it involves many small transactions which require fast finalization. And since this is one of the main value propositions of Raiden, it is a great fit for us to participate in this project. For more information on the project check out this resource (article in German).

So far the main work done by brainbot and Raiden has been on demos and prototypes. This includes a first PoC showcasing the advantages that the Raiden Network brings to IoT micropayments in terms of finalization and transaction fees. We will bring more updates about this project in future Raiden Pulse blog posts.

People: Two new developers have joined our team. A very warm welcome to Fernando and Ivan. They will both be joining the Raiden Python Client team. We are looking forward to seeing their contributions to the code base and to have some interesting and challenging discussions with them!

Unfortunately, Dominik left the team in March. We wish him all the best in the future and thank him for his many valuable contributions to the project.

Raiden Trust: We’re currently going through a new round of applications and will get to reviewing new applications very soon.

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

Weekly development updates: The weekly updates by u/BOR4 and u/Mat7ias still go out every week. It’s now been more than three years with weekly updates. We really appreciate the great work and hope that the community enjoys the updates too. 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

• Unfortunately, with Covid-19 still ongoing and all in-person conferences being cancelled or moved to a later point in time, there aren’t many interesting event updates to write about that took place in the last couple of months. Hopefully it will not be long before we once again can write about meetups, conferences and other events!

What’s up next?

• We will be participating in the Scaling Ethereum hackathon that takes place from April 16th to May 15th as a Pillar sponsor. This means that we will have a bunch of prizes and a workshop among other things. More information will be posted about this on our social media accounts in the next couple of days, so make sure to keep an eye out.
• Please make sure to follow us on Twitter 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. We’re especially looking for a Comms and Marketing genius that’s interested in spreading the word of Raiden even further.

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.