Hey everyone,

I hope you’re ready for another weekly recap. This week again I got help from u/Mat7ias and Lefteris, but since as we all know Lefteris is in Boston, presenting Raiden on L2 Summit, I didn’t want to bother him too much. Apart from standard retrospective on development progress in last week, there are two more topics I want to cover in this post. So, let’s start.

New activity in EIP 712

In case you forgot, EIP 712 is what’s holding back the release of µRaiden MVP. The proposal got a little messy so it hasn’t yet been resolved and merged even though it’s been quite some time since it was created as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP).

There wasn’t much activity around the EIP in the last couple of weeks, that is up until a few days ago. Nick Johnson, who has authority to approve and merge the changes suggested in EIP 712, reviewed the whole EIP once again and he left a few more change requests. His activity sparked more discussion inside the thread (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/712).

It is hard to say how close the Ethereum community is to reaching consensus and merging this Improvement Proposal, but progress is evidently there.

I would like to take a chance to repeat that even though EIP 712 is impacting µRaiden MVP release, it’s not stopping other projects from working with µRaiden.

L2 Summit

L2 Summit was the conference that was held in Boston at the end of this week. The main focus of the conference was Layer 2 protocols. Raiden is a Layer 2 protocol, so Brainbot decided to participate by sending Lefteris to join the State Channel Panel.Videos from the conference are not yet available, so I had to use multiple sources to reconstruct what was going on there.From the information I found, the conference went great. To keep it short I made a list of all the things that happened at the conference:

• Temperature dropped 10 degrees Celsius on the first day, catching Lefteris off guard a little bit. Let’s hope he didn’t catch a cold because of that :)
• Day one started with multiple presentations about new ideas in second layer protocols. If you are interested what exactly the presentations were about, the live twitter updates Lefteris (https://twitter.com/LefterisJP) and Patrick (https://twitter.com/paddyucl) (researcher from UCL) made are the best sources I could find so far
• Later that day was the State Channel Panel where they had an open discussion about second layer protocols. Raiden’s side of the story was presented by Lefteris
• Lefteris mentioned on twitter that he synced with Conner (https://twitter.com/bitconner) and Alex Bosworth (https://twitter.com/alexbosworth) from Lightning labs and Interledger. There was a number of more significant network discussions so the event was very productive.
• On second day a hackathon was held where devs (many of whom were students) gave their best shot at tinkering with layer two protocols

All in all many talks were held, new ideas were exchanged about solving engineering challenges for second layer protocols, which I feel is the most important takeaway from the event. We are still eagerly waiting for videos and I will let you all know once they are available.

Development progress

Summer is coming quick and the team is wasting no time. They’re still in a phase where several big merges happen each week. They could split those big issues in few smaller ones, but end result would be the same.

I was wondering if the lists of issues in Red Eyes milestone are final or there might be another planning phase where they will add new ones. The lists are indeed more or less final. Of course, some smaller ones pop up during the development and they sort those out as well. The big issues may get split into smaller issues in the future but they will still follow the goals set out by the milestone.

Biggest addition to the code base this week was the smart contract for the monitoring service. It is a big feature so reviewing and correcting it took a lot of time, but it is merged now. Another big one was handling of the locked amount in raiden client repository.

Several smaller issues were tackled as well and were successfully reviewed and merged to the code base and a few are waiting for review.

In the spec repository we can see they added a description for how things work if you want to withdraw funds from channel without closing it and how cooperative settle works. The interesting thing about topping up a channel and withdrawing while the channel is open is that it’s a really difficult thing to implement for Lightning on the Bitcoin blockchain. A special technique called Splicing was invented to solve this problem and it's still a work in progress.

Conclusion

Progress in EIP712, L2 Summit in Boston and several big features completed are three major things to take away from the last week. I want to thank everyone for the support and the guys who helped me in creating this post. With every week behind us, the future is looking a little brighter and I think that is the most important thing currently. As always I am open to any questions in the comments and I will give my best to answer them best I can.

Have a good one!

EDIT: auto moderator didn't like short links, so had to repost!