Hey everyone,

First of all, I’m sorry there was no update last week. I went on a little trip last weekend and even though I’d planned to do a post I just didn’t have the conditions to do a quality update at the standard I want to give you guys. On the other side, the Raiden team didn’t take a single day off and there are multiple new updates I would like to cover in this post. For that reason, I will try to keep this post as focused on development progress as possible with only one small topic unrelated to Raiden’s development progress.

Raiden development progress

The team is currently working towards reaching the Red Eyes milestone. Once the Red Eyes milestone has been reached, Raiden will be released on the main net. The release date was announced to be sometime this Summer and the good news is that the team seemed confident they will be able to manage it.

The Red Eyes milestone goal has four big meta issues it’s aimed to solve.

Issues are:

• Recoverability of the Raiden client
• Refactoring
• Integration of smart contracts
• Implementation of Matrix as a transport protocol

Recoverability of the Raiden client

Recoverability is a software’s ability to handle unexpected events by itself, or with very little user interaction. An example of an unexpected event would be a power outage. Software that has sufficient recoverability in event of power outage wouldn’t lose any data and should have no trouble with continuing its work once power is restored.

The team made good progress with this feature. If we check the remaining recoverability related issues in the Red Eyes milestone on github, we can see that the meta recoverability issue has ten out of thirteen subtasks completed.

Refactoring

Refactoring of code is a process where the codebase undergoes changes, but no new features are added. An example of this would be the optimization of existing features.

The biggest part of refactoring was done inside the contracts repository and if we check what the open refactoring related issues are inside the contract repository Red Eyes milestone goal, we can see that there are none left. Inside the Raiden client github repository there are no refactoring related issues left.

Integration of Matrix Protocol

Since the team decided to implement Matrix as their go to transport protocol, a big merge where the majority of the features were added was done few weeks ago but that sprouted several smaller issues which the team is actively working on sorting out. A large effort is put into testing everything and we can expect a few more smaller issues to arise over time, but that’s just normal during a testing phase.

Integration of smart contracts

The integration of smart contracts is a feature that got the least love up until now. The reason being was the fact that the team had to prepare everything inside the contracts repository first, before they could start working on integration itself. As we already mentioned, the contract repository is ready now, so I expect the work on integration will start very soon.

Issue #1383 is sort of meta issue for this feature and we can see it has nine subtasks inside of it. The team has split up the meta issue into smaller issues (#1476, #1478, #1479, ...) and assigned each of the smaller ones to a different team member. The biggest problem now is that several people are working on the same thing at the same time and it takes careful planning to prevent stepping on each other’s toes. Apart from some team members working on the smart contract integration, a few other team members will work on different issues at the same time. I’m sure they will handle it with the least trouble possible, so I’m not worried at all about that.

Miscellaneous

Aside from development, the team’s putting a lot of effort in testing everything the best they can. Results of testing can’t be seen directly, but every time there is a bug fixed, you can be sure they found it by testing every possible scenario.

Last week the team added a complimentary milestone goal called ‘Red Eyes Deployment’ to Raiden’s client repository. The purpose of the separate milestone was they wanted to avoid cluttering up the ‘Red Eyes’ milestone goal with features not necessary for Red Eyes itself, but the features added to the ‘Red Eyes Deployment’ milestone would still be necessary for proper deployment, launch and usage of the Red Eyes version of the network. This includes secondary infrastructure, documentation, tutorials e.t.c.

EIP 712

As you probably know, but it is worth repeating for the new readers, EIP 712 is a key feature that needs to be added to Ethereum code base so µRaiden can reach MVP release.

The developer community members interested in the proposal added several more changes to the pull request and it seems that the community is not far from reaching the final agreement about what should be covered in this proposal and how it should be implemented.

It’s been almost nine months since EIP 712 was first proposed and at some points it seemed that consensus will never be reached, but right now I feel the situation has significantly improved. It is hard to say when the work around EIP 712 will be finalized, but it feels to me that we are not that far away.

Even though EIP 712 is needed for µRaiden’s MVP release, it’s not stopping projects interested in the tech from working with µRaiden.

Conclusion

There we are! I would like to thank /u/Mat7ias and Lefteris for helping me once again with my post and everyone in the community for the big support. I am sorry if you were expecting a post last week and I didn’t deliver, but if it means anything I had great fun last weekend :). As always, any questions are more than welcome and I will give my best to answer them best I can.

Cheers!