Hey everyone,

Little by little and here we are, weekly update number 20. It’s been a wild ride, but to be honest I think it’s just the beginning. This week we will explain one very important subject, learn how it affects Raiden Network and do a standard coverage of progress on Github. I hope you are ready!

UTXO

UTXO or Unspent Transaction Output is output of a transaction which isn't yet an input of another transaction. Bitcoin is based on an UTXO model (as are many other cryptocurrencies), so to make things a little simpler I will try to explain UTXOs from Bitcoin perspective.

UTXOs in Bitcoin are created on each transaction. Inputs of Bitcoin transactions are UTXOs that are locked to a sender's address and the output is an UTXO locked to the receiver’s address. The receiver can then use that newly created UTXO to create new transactions. Once the UTXO is used to create a transaction it’s then marked as spent and it can’t be used to create new transactions.

The balance of an address is the sum of all UTXOs locked to that address. The database containing all UTXOs of all addresses is public, just like the transactions and addresses.

Since Bitcoin is based on an UTXO model, Lightning network (Bitcoin equivalent of Raiden Network) is built in respect to that fact.

Now you must be wondering why I wanted to cover this topic. Well, it was needed so everyone can understand the next section.

L2 Summit State Channel Panel

Brainbot participated in the L2 Summit held in Boston this May. Lefteris, one of the Raiden developers, represented Raiden Network and he was invited to participate on the State Channel panel. There was no live stream available, but the organizers were kind enough to upload videos on youtube that cover almost everything.

In this section I will try to cover my top three topics that were discussed during the panel. The target audience of the panel discussion was mostly not for beginners, but I will try to explain it as simple as possible.

The Monitoring Services in Raiden Network will be responsible for keeping an eye on the users funds while the user is offline. This concept is present across many second layer projects and it’s not yet perfected. Lefteris confirmed that the team is actively collaborating with Patrick McCorry, a researcher at UCL, to find new ways of perfecting this service.

Another one of the topics on the panel was discussion of the similarity between Lightning Network and Raiden Network. Lefteris confirmed that Raiden borrowed a lot of ideas from Lightning Network. But, since Lightning Network is implemented on top of Bitcoin (key point being it’s based on top of an UTXO model) and Raiden Network is implemented on top of Ethereum that is not based on top of an UTXO model, some adjustments were required. Essentially, developing on top of Ethereum made some things for the Raiden developers easier (such as opening a channel) and simply porting Lightning Network on top of Ethereum wouldn’t work.

The last topic discussed that I want to cover in this post is interoperability between different second layer projects. The panel agreed that interoperability between projects (for example between Lightning and Raiden network) is currently not the main focus in this space, but conferences like the L2 Summit help prevent projects from drifting away too much. They offer an excellent opportunity for all layer 2 projects to plan to collaborate and to share ideas which improve efficiency and future progress.

These are my three main points from the panel. If you are interested to see the whole thing, the video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzoS0tPUAiQ&feature=youtu.be&t=2h10m9s

Development progress

Development is currently in warp 10 mode and it’s hard to follow everything. The main focus is still on the raiden client repository. Integration of smart contracts progressed significantly in the last week and several more sub tasks were closed.

Apart from smart contract integration, the team spent a lot of time working on tests, Matrix implementation, deployment, code standards, optimizations, small bug fixes, documentation and I still probably forgot to mention something.

I want to give credit to team for really tidying up their Github. All the big features were split up into sub tasks and everything is extensively labelled now, which makes following their progress really easy.

There are several features ready for review waiting for next week and few more that are works in progress. All the features the team decided to put bounty on were started by someone outside of development team which is really nice to see.

We got reconfirmation from Lefteris that Red Eyes release is indeed coming this Summer and by the tempo they are working that does not surprise me at all.

Conclusion

With every week behind us we are step closer to Red Eyes release and it is hard for me to hide excitement about it. I would like to thank everyone for support and /u/Mat7ias and Lefteris for help with the update. If you have any questions, don’t be shy and just leave a comment, I will try to find an answer for you.

This post is dedicated to one very good boy that left my side this Friday. I already miss you.

Cheers!