Hey everyone,

we have very eventful week behind us. There was a presentation on Raiden in Toronto on Edcon conference, development is coming along nicely and I have a feeling community is waking up from winter hibernation. I planned to do a separate post where I will comment Edcon presentation and share my perspective on Liquidity talking smack about Raiden, but I decided to include that in weekly github update. So, let's not be like Liquidity and be all talk and no work and start this week's post.

Lefteris talk on Edcon

If you missed it, there was a big conference in Toronto called edcon. Raiden was presented there by one of the core Raiden developers, Lefteris. You can find VOD from the conference in this subreddit, so I won't repost it again.

It was pretty short presentation (only 15 minutes) and at first it looks like nothing what we already didn't know was said. But, if you read between the lines you will realize how important this presentation was.

First of all, I want to congratulate Lefteris on executing respecatble presentation in front not so small crowd at the conference. Presentation itself was not perfect, but you have to give a guy some credit. He is one of the best blockchain devs in the world (not a marketing/public speaker) and not a native english speaker. Watching his presentation I had a feeling he wanted to explain many topics in depth, but then he would realize he had only 15 minutes and that would tip his balance during the talk. Fact that his talk was late due to whole conference being a little late, didn't help his concentration.

You have to realize one other thing. On a 2 day conference, holding a presentation is just a tip of an iceberg. Interlinking and mingling with other people from the tech field is so much more important. I am sure Lefteris with his hard not to love personality and incredible tech knowledge nailed that part. We can only guess what kind of agreements and deals he managed to negotiate.

So, with all that out of the way, let me tell you 3 key points I got from his talk and why I think this conference was a beginning of a new era in Raiden's relationship with a community. Even tho there is a general opinion in the community that Raiden team is not listening to its community, Lefteris presentation is a proof they are listening very closely and they decided to address some of the most common misconceptions.

There was a lot of talk how Brainbot is not hiring new devs to help with a project. I already explained how hiring an experienced developer takes at least 3 months (interviews waiting before he can leave current position) and it can take up to 3 more months before that person gets to know code so he can really contribute. In his talk he presented that team is currently 14 devs strong and that this accusation is false. 14 developers is respectable number. To put in perspective, when Instagram got sold to Facebook for 1B, it had 13 people working in total (cleaning lady is one of 13).

Second key point Lefteris addressed are accusations how Brainbot acts like they are only ones working on scaling. Him comparing Raiden to other projects shows how they are very aware of other projects and they are following their progress closely.

Third, and to me most surprising thing that he said on a conference are rough estimations of when Red Eyes and Ithaca milestones are planned to be reached. If you missed it, Red Eyes is planned to be reached during summer and Ithaca by the end of the year. Reason why this was such a big surprise is because before the conference there was never official confirmation of any deadline. Even tho these were very rough estimations it is step in the right direction and I expect we will soon get more accurate and more often updates on when are release dates planned.

This is my personal view on his talk. If you have anything to add or any questions, be free to share/ask in comments :).

Liquidity trash talking

Another interesting presentation on Edcon was one by Liquidity Network project. Since their code is not open source (you can't see it if you are not an employee) and they didn't have anything to showcase, they decided to spend their 15 minutes trash talking other projects.

Their comparison between Raiden and Liquidity Network can be summed up in 4 words: "We gud, they bad". I will immediately say, Raiden has its difficulties, but they are giving their best to sort them out. Liquidity is hiding their code, waving with their white paper and talking smack.

Their white paper is not even a complete product. I didn't study it in depth so I don't know if everything they say is possible, but let's say it is. Their white paper is more like a really cool feature of a small part of a project. Let me try to put it in perspective for you. Let's say Liquidity is actually Ethereum. Their white paper would cover Ethash and nothing else.

There was lots of talk how Liquidity will offer 0 gas transactions. If you read white paper you will see that 0 gas transactions are possible only in very best case. Let me ask you, what works mostly in it's optimal state?

Red Eyes

Let's remember ourselves what are 4 key features of Red Eyes milestone goal. Those would be:

• Recoverability of Raiden client
• Refactoring
• Integration of Smart Contracts
• Matrix transport protocol

Currently whole project (with all the repositories) is in phase where they do pretty big changes targeting one of 4 key features and they don't bother with smaller ones too much. Last week we had huge commit regarding refactoring, this week Matrix transport protocol was the focus. Since most of the logic regarding Matrix will be shared between all the services, most was merged into raiden-libs (shared repository between all the rest). What they need to do now is implement using that logic in rest of the repositories. We can see that they already started doing that and we can expect more big important commits in rest of the repositories now.

One big merge happened in raiden client repository as well. Message queues were added and we can already see another big commit utilizing the first one in the reviewing phase. It is pretty big and I think it will take them couple more days before they merge that one as well.

Messages for communicating with pathfinding were worked on and format of messages representing fees was as well.

In many different repositories you can see "work in progress" commits targeting key features of Red Eyes milestone and I expect them to sort them one by one as the development is done.

All in all, commits are not coming very often but when they do, they are big and important.

Ithaca

Even tho Ithaca release is planned after Red Eyes, team is working on it as well. I won't go into details, to keep post short but progress is there. I expect them to add more issues in Ithaca goal in the future, so current list of features sitting in Ithaca milestone goal on github is not final.

Conclusion

Lefteris talk and big commits have marked the past week. Your support is great as always and I invite you to join us on Telegram if you are not already didn't. I am open to any questions as always and I will try to answer them best I can.

Keep your head up, good times are coming!

Cheers!