Raiden Pulse #5: News from March and April
March and April have been busy for the Raiden team. In this update, we will briefly walk you through the progress with regards to overall development progress, developer experience improvements, conferences, hackathons, new joiners and more!
Development & General Updates
- Development towards Ithaca: Working prototypes of the Raiden Services (Pathfinding Service / Monitoring Service) have been built, which receive RDN tokens for their services. The work done includes design, integration with the Raiden Client, deployment of our services smart contracts and tests. Furthermore, substantial work went into stabilizing the Raiden Client and fixing bugs. The latest release candidate additionally got battle-tested by hackers using the Raiden API at the ETHCapeTown hackathon.
- Collaboration: Raiden will soon be available on DAppNode, allowing users to conveniently run a Raiden node with minimal effort. DAppNode is a simple, easy and self-empowering system designed specifically for hosting P2P clients for DApps, VPNs, etc. If you already want to get started trying DAppNode for other nodes like Ethereum or IPFS, you can download it here. Also check out DAppNode’s tweet storm to learn more about our collaboration.
- Developer Portal: Two weeks ago, our brand new Developer Portal was launched. At developer.raiden.network you can now find all the resources needed to get started building on top of Raiden. Consider this portal to be a v0, which will be extended with more content and exemplary hacks and projects built on Raiden over time. Please also feel free to give us feedback should you miss anything by sending an email to developer[at]raiden.network.
- Testnet support: The Raiden smart contracts are now deployed on Goerli testnet, a proof-of-authority cross-client testnet, supporting Parity Ethereum, Geth, Nethermind, Pantheon, and EthereumJS clients. The Goerli testnet syncs in a few minutes and is very convenient for testing purposes. The respective Raiden Explorer page is available here. Raiden on Goerli has first come to use at ETHCapeTown.
- Raiden Trust: The Raiden Trust was launched on 25th of April. The Raiden Trust will fund projects helping to build and grow the Raiden Network ecosystem. Read more in the Raiden Trust launch announcement and follow the Raiden Trust on Twitter.
- Weekly development updates: As always, if you are interested in more in depth development updates, 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.
ETHCapeTown
- ETHCapeTown was ETHGlobal’s first hackathon taking place in Africa, bringing together roughly 200 international and local hackers, mentors, judges and crypto projects
- Raiden sponsored an API prize equalling 2,000 USD in RDN tokens. Outside of the official Raiden API prize, we decided to award the second and third best project with 500 USD in RDN each, additionally.
The three best projects using the Raiden API were:
- NИtube: incentivized, decentralized P2P live streaming with micropayments using Raiden, introducing “Proof-of-Stream-Payment”. See a video demo here.
- FaïrSpöt: incentivized WiFi internet sharing/ WiFi access on-the-go (paid in 100kb chunks) using Raiden, inspired by the Freifunk project. See a video demo here.
- dTok: decentralized streaming and tipping platform with a pay-as-you-go model using Raiden payments through a BurnerWallet integration. See a video demo here.
Also check out our tweet storm of the ETHCapeTown pitching day, covering most projects that hacked on Raiden or see an overview of all hackathon submissions here.
People
We are happy to welcome Nils to the team, who supports Raiden as a DevOps since March 1st!
Events
- March 6–7: Raiden attended the Ethereum Community Conference, EthCC, in Paris, where participants could try out Raiden on mainnet at the Raiden booth. Moreover, Paul and Franzi gave an update on the latest state of Raiden and the work towards better developer and user experience (DX and UX). You can watch their talk here.
- March 12: Oliver gave a technical introduction into the Raiden basics at the local Mainz Crypto Meetup.
- April 18: Raiden took part in the DeFi CapeTown event as an ecosystem partner, presenting Raiden to participants in the networking session at the University of Cape Town.
- April 19–21: Raiden sponsored ETHCapeTown and supported teams hacking on Raiden on-site. See more in the ETHCapeTown section of this update!
What’s up next?
- May 22: Stefan will take part in the “Scaling the Public Blockchain for Payments” meetup in Frankfurt, alongside with representatives from Perun and Lightning Network.
- June 10–12: Catch Dominik representing Raiden at CogX in London on the Web3 stage.
- August 21–23: Lefteris will be sharing an update on Raiden at dAppcon, the Developer Conference for Ethereum Dapps & Infrastructure, in Berlin.
- August 23–25: Raiden will be part of ETHBerlinZwei, the second edition of the Ethereum hackathon in Berlin!
- Please make sure to follow our Twitter feed for more announcements on upcoming events.
Contributing
Run Raiden! You can contribute by running a Raiden node on the mainnet that is always online and has access to an Ethereum node. By doing so, you add capacity to the WETH network. You can find a video installation guide here.
Test Raiden! You can also help us by testing and giving feedback! To test, download the latest version of Raiden, open channels and send off-chain token transfers or have a look at the Raiden API. In case of problems, you can ask us any technical questions on Gitter.
Join our team! We have added a few exciting new openings, so why not apply to join our team? 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 refer somebody.
Your support and feedback means a lot to us!
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The Raiden Team
