Hey everyone!

If you got lost in all the news and updates about Raiden this week, you’ve come to the right place. Together we’ll go through everything that happened, try to explain importance of it and see what we can expect in the future. First, let’s start with the biggest update this week, an Icalo release.

Icalo

The Icalo release is the result of development reaching the Red Eyes Testnet milestone. It’s a Ropsten testnet release, done in preparation to Lefteris’ talk at Dappcon Berlin, and the main goal is to provide all of the functionalities on the testnet that the Red Eyes release will offer on Ethereum mainnet.

Alongside the Icalo release, the team published an article on Medium. The article briefly explains what Icalo is, summarizes the plan for the Red Eyes release and invites everyone to join them in testing Raiden on the Ropsten testnet. If you’re interested to see how Raiden works and want to get your hands dirty, the article should give you a great starting point, so I suggest you check it out.

Apart from giving everyone the opportunity to try out all the new features developed in the last months on the testnet, Icalo will help the team to track down potential bugs they wouldn’t be able to find otherwise. Ropsten is an environment as similar as possible to the Ethereum mainnet and anything running smoothly on Ropsten is a great indication that there shouldn’t be any trouble once Raiden hits the mainnet.

A number of the developers in the wider community have already accepted invitations to help out in testing and we can see an increased activity in Raiden's gitter and Github. The team’s always very welcoming towards outside developers and are giving their best to get them started in their testing.

Dappcon Berlin

The introduction to Dappcon was already covered in last weeks Github update, so if you missed it, you can find it here.

This week we’ll follow up and go through Lefteris’ presentation. The beginning was similar to the presentation at Master workshop (covered in weekly update 23), after which he introduced the Icalo release and showcased a video demonstration of the Raiden Network release. There were some brief technical difficulties with the laser pointer during the presentation but apart from that it went swimmingly.

Unfortunately for myself the livestream during the panel didn’t want to work. We reached out to the event organisers after Dappcon to get information on when the videos would be clipped and published and they said within the next week or two. So, we’ll have to wait for that to give a summary on the panel discussion.

Apart from representing Raiden on stage, team as always caught up with many other experts in the field, where I believe many new ideas were shared. Lefteris even found time to do a brief interview with Coindesk and challenge Yoda to a lightsaber duel.

Development progress

With the Red Eyes Testnet milestone reached, the team can now focus on minor issues that were left out from the Icalo release and go hard on testing everything for Red Eyes. Testing on Ropsten has already helped in finding several smaller bugs and the team is finding best possible approach to fixing them.

Apart from bugs, the team wants to change few things in the UI and finish all of the documentation that’ll be contained in the Red Eyes release.

I would like to point out that in current phase of the development, changes in code will be more rare and less drastic. A lot more time will be spent for testing everything and monitoring of the code’s behaviour in different situations. That’s why the number of commits and activity on Github is currently not an accurate representation of amount of work team is putting if you try to compare it to the commits and Github activity prior to the testnet release.

Conclusion

To finish off this weeks update, we’ve had a very eventful and exciting week with lots of interest from the developer community as a result of Icalo and Dappcon so I’d just like to include a congratulations to the dev team on that. Thanks again to all the guys at brainbot and the community for your support. I hope everyone has a great week and, as always, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask in the comments!

Cheers!