Raiden Pulse #7: News from July and August
The summer went by at the speed of light. Let’s take a moment to summarize the last two months and have a look at the overall development progress and all the other stuff that we’ve been up to in July and August!
Development Updates towards next Mainnet Milestone Alderaan
- Alderaan mainnet: Development and testing towards the next release candidate and milestone Alderaan progressed. Alderaan will be the first integrated mainnet release coming with a service layer (monitoring and pathfinding service) and recently added new features (channel withdraw, source routing, mediation fees).
- Integration testing: In preparation for Alderaan, extensive integration testing (integrated client with services) using the scenario player took place.
- Technical debt: Progress has been made towards reducing technical debt, e.g. by examining flaky tests in the integration tests.
- Mediation fee framework: The dynamic mediation fee model has been implemented in the testnet releases. The framework allows mediating nodes to set a flat fee, a fee proportional to the transaction size and an imbalance fee, the latter taking into consideration the preferred channel balance. You can read more details about dynamic mediation fees in Raiden here.
General Updates
- Raiden Client: The latest Raiden testnet release is v0.100.5a0 “Antifragile Crocodile”. Linux, ARM and MacOS binaries can be found on the Raiden release page. Furthermore, you can find the corresponding Raiden Services here.
- Raiden Light Client: The very first version of the Raiden light client “v0.1-Properly Cool” has been released for all major Ethereum testnets. The release allows users to
+ Connect/disconnect with token networks
+ Open/close/settle channels
+ Deposit tokens
+ Make payments to any node in the network, including multi-hop payments
Please note that the light client does not allow for receiving tokens yet. Make sure to send payments to Raiden full nodes. v0.1 is only compatible with Raiden client v0.100.2 (not with the latest contracts). You can play with the reference implementation of the SDK by visiting https://lightclient.raiden.network. - Raiden Onboarding: Our new onboarding tool, the Raiden Wizard, enables you to download, install and launch Raiden (on testnet for now) in < 5 mins and with minimal effort. Check out the Raiden Wizard section below to learn more.
- Raiden Trust: The Raiden Trust closed its first application wave on Aug 31 and is now reviewing submissions. You can, at any time, apply for a Raiden Trust grant! Find all details about grant applications and guidelines here.
- Awesome Raiden repository: Raiden now has its own “Awesome” repo! Awesome Raiden is a community-curated list of resources, links, projects, tools and hacks on, for and around Raiden.
- Raiden WebUI: The latest release of the WebUI includes new client features like withdrawing tokens from open channels as well as minting tokens directly via the interface. Furthermore, it now exposes environment and chain information.
- 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.
Raiden Wizard
The Raiden Wizard is our latest onboarding tool and aims to make the installation of Raiden as easy as 1–2–3. The Raiden Wizard takes care of all the necessary installation steps for the user and launches Raiden and the WebUI.
The user solely needs to
It’s an early stage implementation and meant to be used exclusively on the Görli testnet for now.
Gitcoin Hackathon Winners
Raiden is proud to have sponsored the virtual hackathons “Beyond Blocks” and “Grow Ethereum”, powered by Gitcoin. The winning projects hacking on Raiden are:
- Best Raiden enhancement hack: Golang client library to interact with Raiden, by Christopher
- Best IoT hack with Raiden: LED matrix display controlled by ESP8266 to display messages paid for through Raiden, by pisuthd
- Best Raiden open bounty contribution: Raiden-powered Twitter bot by Rahul
- Best Raiden lib: Typescript SDK for interacting with the Raiden API by Ryan
Thanks so much for your contributions everybody!
People
A very warm welcome to Thomas, who joined the Raiden team in August. Thomas is a Senior JavaScript developer supporting the team with regards to front-end related tasks.
Events
- June 23-July 10: Raiden sponsored bounties during Gitcoin’s Beyond Blocks hackathon.
- July 29 -August 15: Raiden sponsored bounties during Gitcoin’s Grow Ethereum hackathon.
- August 21: Lefteris shared an update on Raiden “Next stop Alderaan: Feature preview of Raiden’s upcoming release” and participated in the “Road to scalability” panel at Dappcon, the Developer Conference for Ethereum Dapps & Infrastructure, in Berlin.
- August 21: Dominik attended the Layer 2 Meetup Blockchain Week Berlin Edition and participated in a discussion with representatives from Alacris, Matic, Matter Labs and PISA Research. You can watch a recording of it here.
- August 23: Franzi hosted a Raiden workshop at ETHBerlin, here’s an amateur video recording of it (the official recording will be published soon).
- August 23–25: Raiden sponsored ETHBerlinZwei, the second edition of the Ethereum hackathon in Berlin, and was present on-site with mentors, interactive payment channel art and more.
- August 31: First wave of Raiden Trust application closed and applications are now under review.
What’s up next?
- October 8–11: Meet some of us at Devcon5 in Japan!
- 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 refer somebody.
Latest Reading
Enjoy the last days of summer!
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.
