Hey everyone,

After a night of celebrating Croatia’s win over Russia in World Cup (I know you all are hardcore Croatia fans), it is time for another weekly recap of news and development progress. Since the video of Lefteris’ presentation from Master workshop found its way to the interwebs we will do a short recap of the presentation and after that we will check what is new on Github.

Master workshop: off the chain

Master workshop: off the chain was the recent event Raiden attended in Berlin, focused on second layer (L2) oriented projects. Raiden being a L2 scaling solution for Ethereum token transfer meant the development team was naturally right at home at the event. Main goal for the event was mingling with other projects and finding new ideas to implement in Raiden.

In last week’s weekly update we were able to cover the panel from Day 1, which Lefteris participated as a panelist, but due to technical difficulties with the stream we didn’t have the opportunity to see his presentation from Day 2 of the event. Fortunately, the video wasn’t lost and the organizers released it on their Facebook page.

Although there were no new announcements, the presentation itself was great. Since the whole event was already focused on L2 and an understanding of L2 technology is mostly implied it gave Lefteris the opportunity to go deeper in Raiden protocol itself and also dig into other topics, such as their current focus and the importance of UX (user experience).

First part of the presentation was more or less a summary of the presentation from Edcon a few months back. For anyone new (or those that missed it) you can watch that here or read the summary from weekly update 16.

Second part of the presentation is where the fun started. With the help of some nice looking graphic designs and diagrams Lefteris did a step-by-step explanation of the most common scenarios in the Raiden Network transfers. Having me explaining them in words won’t do the presentation justice, so if you’re interested in getting a more in-depth understanding of how the Raiden Network will work when it comes to Mainnet sometime this Summer, I highly recommend watching the presentation here.

Final part of the presentation was about the importance of UX. The whole crypto space is still in its infancy and the second layer space is even younger, so UX isn’t yet at the level it should be. Lefteris discussed how the goal for Raiden is to achieve a level of user friendliness where the end user wouldn’t need to know anything about how Raiden protocol works to use it. I personally think that’s a great goal to strive towards and am very excited to see how they’ll achieve it.

After the presentation a short Q&A took place. The audience was packed with experts in the L2 field which meant questions were very interesting. I personally found discussion about routing the most interesting; Lefteris confirmed that the current implementation of routing is not optimal, but they are actively working on and searching for better solutions. He even mentioned how he got a few ideas from that very conference.

All in all, event went great. Next week is free of conferences, but the week after Dappcon is coming so keep an eye out for that since Lefteris will be doing a presentation on Raiden Network there!

Development progress

Last week we were introduced to the new milestone called Red Eyes Testnet. The goal of that milestone is releasing the Red Eyes version of Raiden to the Testnet.

One of the issues in the new milestone was finishing up integration of smart contracts inside Raiden client repository. I am very happy to announce that all the heavy lifting around that issue is done (link to the commit itself). What’s left are several smaller issues mostly related to tests inside the codebase. Integration of smart contracts was the last of the 4 big development tasks planned for the Red Eyes release. With that out of the way, the code’s very close to being ready for the release on Testnet and the list of remaining issues is getting shorter with each day (for several issues there are pull request ready for review).

I would like to give a special credit to one of the developers from the community who regularly contributes to Raiden, nkbai. His last contribution was finding a bug which the team addressed quickly. Situations like these are one of many reasons why every project should have their codebase publicly available to everyone.

Looking at the current situation of the codebase I’m very confident to say that not too many weeks are between today and a Testnet release.

Conclusion

As always, special thanks for /u/Mat7ias and Lefteris for helping with the post and all the readers. I encourage you again to watch the presentation from Master workshop, as Lefteris mentioned during his presentation “commits are going to the moon”. Don’t forget, if you have any questions just leave a comment.

Cheers!