Hey everyone,

I hope you are enjoying your weekend and that you are ready for a fresh recap of the last week. Apart from standard coverage of development progress I want to cover two more topics. One of those topics I covered numerous times before and this might be the last time I ever write about it. Do you know which topic I am talking about? Well, next chapter hides the answer and the reason so I suggest we keep this short and get down to business.

EIP 712

As you probably know, EIP 712 is what is preventing µRaiden from reaching the MVP release. µRaiden has been on the main net for quite some time now, but MVP release is waiting for EIP 712 to be approved and the implementation of proposal to be coded and merged with the Ethereum codebase.

After months of debate inside the community and several iterations of the solution for this feature, the EIP 712 draft was merged to master yesterday. The merge was done by Nick Johnson (Arachnid), one of the Ethereum developers who has the permission to approve and add proposed changes to the Ethereum code.

Now that the proposal draft has reached community consensus and the draft has been merged, it needs to be finalized and the implementation needs to be accepted but that specifically won't require community input if there are no issues. Once it's finalized the Last Call duration is 14 days after which, if there is no unaddressed complaints, the Ethereum core devs will review it internally.

A list of what’s left to be done before EIP 712 can be considered final and is given a Last Call status:

• Implement eth_signTypedData in major RPC providers.
• Implement web3.eth.signTypedData in Web3 providers.
• Implement keccak256 struct hashing in Solidity.
• Have remaining changes reviewed/accepted so the EIP can be finalized and then go to Last Call.

The bottom line is that the big milestone is behind us (drafting the proposal and reaching community consensus) is behind us and EIP 712 can continue through the pipeline that each proposal has to go through.

If you are interested in what is the exact EIP work flow, you can find the complete spec here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1.md#eip-work-flow

New Medium Article

Last week the team released a new Medium article.

Since pre-ICO times in Raiden FAQ there was a statement that Plasma is not a competition, but rather that Plasma implementations will be complementary to Raiden, or to put it simple, Raiden and Plasma will be able to work together to provide a whole new functionality to the end user.

Back then team didn’t give an example of how they exactly imagined that, but now they’ve helped provide an example in this very medium article.

The article gives an example of how to complete a payment using Raiden and Plasma in the example where one of the involved parties doesn’t even participate in the Raiden Network and Ethereum. Basically, if payee does not have an Ethereum address, the payer can create a transaction that’s locked and is ready to be claimed. Once payee joins the Raiden Network, they can simply follow instructions given by payer to receive their funds. Once they receives their funds, they can do whatever they wants with them (continue using Raiden Network, withdraw them, etc).

It’s a very interesting article and that use case is well described. We can see how the team considers ways in which their product will be used in the future. The complete article can be found via this link: https://medium.com/@raiden_network/creating-an-easy-onboarding-user-experience-for-the-raiden-network-4dcdc9e2eeed

Development Progress

The current main focus of development is the integration of Smart Contracts in the Raiden client. If we speak from a github point of view, they are focused on integrating the raiden-contract repository in the raiden repository. It’s very tricky due to the fact that it’s a pretty big feature and splitting it up in smaller tasks, so it can be worked on by several team members, must be done very carefully to minimize chances of team members stepping on each other toes while they work on it.

Apart from working on smart contract integration, they also worked on several smaller issues; specification of few other features they want to include in Red Eyes release and smaller fixes for other big features (recoverability and integration of Matrix).

Many of these pull requests were reviewed and merged in the past week but there are few more that are works in progress or haven’t yet been reviewed.

All in all, the team’s working very hard towards reaching Red Eyes milestone and it’s hard to pinpoint anything specific because there is just so much going on at the moment.

Conclusion

A very eventful week is behind us. Many pull request were added on github and they all share the same goal: Reaching Red Eyes milestone and releasing Raiden on mainnet. Some of the meta features are pretty close to done and some require more work to be done, but all in all we are getting there. I would like to thank once again u/Mat7ias and Lefteris for the help and community for the support. If you have any questions, just leave a comment and I will give my best to provide the best answer I have.

Cheers!