Raiden Trust Updates
TL;DR
There has been steady progress in the background and we’re excited to share some news with you: Firstly, we’re pleased to announce our first grantee, PISA. Secondly, we want to take the opportunity to introduce our Advisory Board. Lastly, we’re announcing a movement of 16 million RDN from the Raiden MultiSig to the Raiden Trust’s MultiSig.
Grantee: PISA
We are very excited to share that PISA is receiving Raiden Trust’s first grant: 100’000 USD worth of RDN. PISA is building critical infrastructure for off-chain protocols. They are tackling the problem of requiring users to be online at all times by introducing an ‘accountable watching service’. They will use the grant money to continue their work on delivering a working version of PISA, and then work on a Raiden integration. To ensure PISA is open-source its development relies on grants. We’re glad to support such a phenomenal team with a strong academic track record. Not only are they driving off-chain protocol research, but they are also building and shipping the necessary infrastructure.
Advisory Board
The Trustees rely on the advice of an independent group of experts, the Advisory Board, to review and approve grant applications. The Advisory Board reviews all grant applications and subsequently makes a reasoned recommendation to the Trustees on whether or not to approve a grant application. Ultimately the Trustees decide whether to approve a grant. Each grant application needs to be reviewed from several angles. The Trustees have therefore appointed experts with technical, business and community backgrounds to the Advisory Board. This allows the Raiden Trust to follow a holistic decision making process. Read more on this topic here. We are thrilled to present our Advisory Board:
Patrick McCorry was UK’s first PhD graduate in cryptocurrencies from Newcastle University and until recently he was an Assistant Professor at King’s College London. He now dedicates his time to build and protect global, privacy-preserving, permissionless and off-chain smart contracts. Further, he is a member of IC3 and teaches free deep-dive developer bootcamps.
Kamal Ved is senior manager (“Leitender Angestellter”) at brainbot technologies AG, a blockchain development studio and a Venture Partner at Lunar Ventures, a Berlin based deep tech VC. Previously, he has worked at companies like Amazon, Oracle and Bosch. He also was an Executive Director for the BigchainDB Protocol project and also co-founded a tech startup.
Lefteris Karapetsas has been a contributor to the Raiden Network since 2016.
Stefan Teis is senior manager (“Leitender Angestellter mit Prokura”) at brainbot technologies AG, a blockchain development studio. Prior to joining brainbot, he was responsible for Deutsche Börse AG’s blockchain initiative. He is a theoretical physicist by education and has previously also worked for SAP AG and McKinsey & Company.
Mattias Nystorm is a highly active and valuable Raiden community member. He co-authors the Reddit Weekly update series on /r/raidennetwork and is the initiator of the community-curated list of anything related to Raiden.
Sebastian Faust is a Professor at TU Darmstadt, where he leads the Applied Cryptography group. He co-started the Perun project, an academic initiative working on a framework that supports off-chain protocols for simple payments and generic smart contract off-chain execution.
We are very thankful to all members of the Advisory Board, who donate their precious time to the Raiden Trust and help drive the Raiden Network ecosystem.
Currently the Advisory Board is reviewing two more grant applications so stay tuned for updates or apply for a grant yourself here. If you need any assistance or guidance on preparing a grant application please also feel free to reach out to us at contact@raidentrust.li.
Movement of Funds
Finally, we want to announce that as a final step of setting up the Raiden Trust, we are going to fund the Raiden Trust MultiSig by sending 16 million RDN from the Raiden MultiSig to the Raiden Trust MultiSig. The allocation of 16 million RDN to the Raiden Trust was already announced before the token generating event in this blog post.
