Hey everyone,

Now that the weekly updates can legally have a beer in the States, let’s continue to bring more fresh content about project. This week we will do a little reminder about an event that is taking place next weekend, explain one very important property of networks and see what’s happening on Github.

Master workshop: off the chain

Master workshop: off the chain is a two-day event taking place in Berlin on the 30th of June and 1st of July. The focus of the workshop is state channels and second layer scaling solutions, Raiden will be there represented by Lefteris (Raiden Network core developer).

Although the title of the event states that it’s a workshop, if you check their website you will notice that the agenda resembles a classic conference. In other words, every speaker on the event has a 30 minute time frame for a presentation, there’ll be two panels at the end of each day and breaks for lunch and coffee between presentations.

Lefteris will be speaking on the second day from 10:30am local time and the title of his presentation is “Raiden: the payment channel network for Ethereum”. The title of the presentation doesn’t reveal too much in itself, but the purpose of the workshop will be focused on mingling with other layer 2 solutions. The presentation will be relatively basic and likely nothing new if we take into account recent presentations, although perhaps it will be more technical.

There are many other interesting presentations scheduled for the Master workshop with a number of significant speakers from the Layer 2 space. If you want to find out more then I’d suggest the workshop’s homepage is a great place to start. Let’s also highlight that Lefteris will be presenting Raiden Network at DappCon which is being held on the 19th-20th of July.

Six degrees of separation

During the last week there’s been a video that’s surfaced of Jacob’s (Raiden developer) presentation on Raiden Network at the Ethereum Asia Tour in Tokyo.

The presentation’s very interesting and Jacob did great job at representing the project, but one small detail caught my eye. During his talk he mentions how if a network is well balanced it should never require more than 6 steps for any payment to reach another participant in the network.

I was a little dumbfounded about why 6 specifically and where that number even comes from. But then I remembered, that property of a network is due to the six degrees of the separation.

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all living things and everything else in the world are Six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of Six steps. For example, that means it wouldn’t require more than 6 phone calls in total for you to reach president Trump.

The development team’s very aware of that idea and they want to achieve it inside the Raiden Network once it comes to the Ethereum Mainnet. The most obvious attempt of achieving Six degrees of separation in the Raiden Network is the team’s plan to connect each new participant of the network to several other existing participants upon joining.

This means that in the future when the Raiden Network has grown on the Mainnet, the path for your token transfer to any other participant of Raiden Network should never be longer than 6.

Development progress

The week just past on Github is, I think, the most eventful week since I started following the project. The Raiden client and Raiden smart contracts are still in main focus.

If we check what’s inside the Red Eyes milestone goal in the Raiden repository, we’ll see there are 13 issues left and 33 are closed. Github has helped us and calculated that the project’s currently sitting at 71% complete for the Red Eyes release.

That number, although not completely wrong, isn’t representative of the complete truth about current progress. Not all issues are the same in terms of complexity and time required to sort them out and each week the team’s adding new issues to the goal.

To get better perspective, I prefer closely following issues inside the Red Eyes milestone goal tagged with the “META” tag. Meta issues are the most significant and they take the most substantial amount of time to sort out. The team was kind enough to split all the meta issues into subtasks which makes tracking their progress much easier for someone not very familiar with the code base.

Often the team will gradually add subtasks from the meta issues to the milestone goal as they're progressing. Sometimes a given subtask in a meta issue is quite large itself and the team will also decide to split it up in a number of smaller tasks. A good example of that is the secret unlock issue. It’s a subtask inside smart contract integration, but has 9 subtasks itself.

Apart from working on the meta issues for Red Eyes release, the team was testing out a few different tools to help them improve the development process, further optimized the code, fixing several smaller bugs, working on more tests, progress on planned future development and much more. So I’m very excited for the progress in the points mentioned above.

I’d also like to welcome a new addition to the team who’s officially started contributing to the Raiden Network Github within the past week, Rakan Alhneiti welcome to the team!

All in all, progress is going great and I’m confident we are bound for the Red Eyes release in the next couple of months.

Conclusion

With temperatures going up throughout Europe, Raiden Red Eyes release seems closer and closer. A few interesting conference participations are coming up very soon, development is going great and I am very optimistic about the future. As always, I would like to thank u/Mat7ias and Lefteris for helping out with the update and invite you to ask any questions you have. Thank you for all the support and I hoped you enjoyed reading this post as much as we did creating it.

Cheers!