The Raiden Network: Now Live on Arbitrum

The value of deploying Raiden on another Layer 2 solution

The transition to a rollup-centric future opens possibilities to leverage the full potential of the Raiden Network for future M2M and IoT use cases. This encouraged the Raiden team to take a closer look at how Raiden can be used on the Arbitrum rollup to lower the setup costs and make Raiden both the fastest and most inexpensive decentralized ERC20 transfer solution.

Having a rollup-native version of Raiden does not only get rid of the high initial costs incurred when running Raiden on the Ethereum mainchain, but it also positions the Raiden Network as a complementary solution that coexists with rollups.

Layering our L2 solution on top of another L2 provides a promising opportunity to advance Raiden’s future and to make the network more viable. That’s why we decided to go with rollups to make this happen!

Lowering Setup Costs

The Raiden protocol is known for its cheap and blazing fast token transfers. However, the initial setup and opening of channels have become increasingly expensive due to the high gas prices.

Up until now, Raiden has only been available on the Ethereum mainnet where users would have to pay unreasonable onboarding costs. With the new deployment on Arbiturm One these costs are significantly lowered, making Raiden more accessible than ever before and a suitable alternative for any project looking to implement and build payment networks.

New Raiden Property with Rollups

We compared the costs between using the Raiden protocol on mainnet, on Arbitrum and just using a rollup.

Based on the gas prices at the time of writing, the table below shows a significant drop in fees and how Raiden gains the property of cheaper onboarding. This highlights the great advantage of using Raiden in a pure P2P ERC20 token transfer environment.

So far the market has not hooked on to the long-anticipated demand for P2P payments. Nevertheless, there are possible future niche use cases such as recurring micro transfers in machine-to-machine and IoT applications where Raiden could provide a valuable scaling solution.

Raiden’s unique attributes make a good case for situations where instant finality, fast transactions, and high throughput at low prices are vital.

Perhaps it is in a rollup-centric Ethereum where Raiden will shine the most, and the future will tell whether running a Raiden Network on rollups will be favored over mainnet.

For Developers: Protocol Changes to Consider

Arbitrum support is currently available for the Light Client.

With this new Light Client Rohini release on Arbitrum, changes have been made to the smart contracts and new contracts were deployed. The main difference between the previous contracts and the new ones is that on-chain timeouts now are counted using timestamps rather than block numbers. This is needed because of the variable frequency in which rollups produce blocks.

For more details on the changes in the smart contract system, see this overview.

If you have tokens on the Light Client Krittika mainnet version and want to use them on the Arbitrum supported Light Client Rohini you will need to withdraw them prior to updating. With the current gas fees, this could be worth doing if the amount in a channel approximates 220 USD.

Both the Raiden Coruscant and the previous Raiden Light Client Krittika mainnet releases are still available if you don’t want to use Raiden on Arbitrum just yet.

The Ethereum mainnet version of the Raiden Light Client dApp is accessible via this new URL, while the new Arbitrum One release can be accessed from the previous raiden.network URL after confirming the update.

If you are using the Light Client SDK or CLI you can simply choose the latest Krittika release for mainnet or the new v3 Rohini release for Arbitrum One.

For Raiden Coruscant, the Ethereum mainnet version can be downloaded and accessed exactly as before.

Test the Light Client on Arbitrum

The Rohini release is available on the Arbitrum testnet Rinkeby. Before using the Raiden dApp or the SDK on Arbitrum, make sure to add the Rinkeby testnet to your Metamask account (e.g. via Chainlist).

Support, Feedback and Bug Report

For any questions, feedback and bug reports you can reach us on Discord. For bugs specifically, you can also create issues in our public repository on Github.

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.