Raiden Pulse #17: News from April, May and June

We’re back with another Raiden Pulse. Due to a very busy end of May and an even busier June, we decided to cover three months in this issue of the Raiden Pulse. A lot of very exciting things happened during the last three months. The Bespin and Ashvini mainnet releases of course taking the prize as the most important things that happened. We won’t be talking too much in-depth about the two new mainnet releases in this blogpost, since there already are separate blogposts available for both. We also have some good news on the marketing side, since we have hired a new Growth Marketing manager! Read the full blogpost for more information on all of this. Let’s dig in!

General Updates

If there’s one thing to take away from the last three months, it’s the fact that the Python client and the light client now have feature parity and are both released on the mainnet. This means that both clients interact with the same contracts and each other seamlessly.

Raiden Client:

• Bespin was released and is live on the Ethereum mainnet. For a deeper dive into the release and all the new features we encourage you to read the announcement blogpost.
• Work has started towards the Coruscant milestone. This milestone will include work on the smart contracts and especially the cooperative settlement feature that will allow for faster channel settlement if both channel partners agree on the state of a given channel.
• Shortly after the Bespin release, the team started working on a new minor release that will add WebRTC support for the transport layer. This will speed up the time it takes to do transfers and increase the stability of the transport layer at the same time.
• You can download the latest mainnet release of the Python client here.

Raiden Light Client:

• The first mainnet version of the light client was released. The Ashvini release brings the light client on feature parity with the Python client. For an in-depth look at what the light client brings, read this blogpost.
• You can try out the Ashvini mainnet release right here: lightclient.raiden.network. Any feedback is highly appreciated!
• The team is preparing a workshop for EthCC, so if you’re going to EthCC and you’re interested in using the light client SDK in your dApp, we encourage you to attend. Feel free to reach out for a personal session too, if the documentation isn’t sufficient.
• On the development side, focus is currently on staying in parity with the Python client on the features mentioned above.

Other Updates:

People: We’re very excited to welcome Dina on board as our new Comms and Marketing manager. Dina is currently focussing on being onboarded to everything Raiden-related and she is spearheading the planning of our EthCC participation.

Raiden Trust: We’re happy to announce that we have approved a grant for Raiden Rust. As the name implies, this is a Rust implementation of Raiden. The project is led by an old Raiden team member. We believe that client diversity is important and furthermore, we are excited about the possibilities that a Raiden client implemented in Rust can offer. We will dive more into this project in a future blogpost.

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: Just as consistently as the Ethereum blockchain keeps on generating new blocks, Boris and Mattias keep on producing new Weekly Raiden 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 Raiden 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

• We sponsored the Scaling Ethereum hackathon. The winning submission for the Raiden challenge was Optimistic Raiden, which ported the Raiden smart contracts to the Optimism EVM.
• Jacob participated in the 0xHack panel discussion about how L2 will help scale Ethereum. You can watch or rewatch the discussion here.

What’s up next?

• We will be at EthCC from the 20th to 22nd of July. We are sponsoring the event, which means we will have a booth, so feel free to drop by. We will have some nice swag and a special Raiden beer for people coming over for a chat. Furthermore, on July 22nd, at 1:25–2:05pm we will be doing a workshop that focuses on getting you started building dApps using the Raiden Light Client SDK. You don’t want to miss it!
• 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.

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.