Hey everyone!

Welcome to another weekly update on Raiden’s progress. This week was conference free, however there was an announcement of Raiden’s participation in the upcoming ETHBerlin conference on the Scaling and Interoperability panel, which will take place on the 7th-9th of September. And in terms of Raiden development, the team had a week fully focused on the testnet release. In this weekly update, we will check what’s in the newest Raiden release and see what the plan is for the upcoming weeks.

Ceteris Paribus

Last week the Icalo version of Raiden was released on the Ropsten testnet (you can find more info in weekly update 25). This Friday the team released the first patch* release with codename Ceteris Paribus.

More frequent releases has been one of the team’s goal for quite some time and I’m glad they’re finally able to implement it in the development process. There are numerous benefits to this approach, but some of the biggest ones are:

• Everyone building on top of Raiden will get the version of Raiden with the newest bug fixes and optimizations more often
• Planning of Raiden’s progress is easier
• Bigger sense of progress for the whole team

Ceteris Paribus is the direct result of development reaching the Red Eyes Testnet2 milestone. Almost all of the changes to the codebase are bug fixes. Although there have been more bugs discovered while testing, the team decided that the ones fixed in Ceteris Paribus require relatively less time, so they addressed them first. Every issue discovered will be fixed and released on testnet for further testing before the Red Eyes release. For the testnet releases they will try to aim for a release once every 1-2 weeks, so that testers can have an installable snapshot from which to tinker with Raiden.

Ceteris Paribus is just the first of several patch releases planned for Raiden before Red Eyes is released to the mainnet. More details about that in the next chapter.

Development progress

A big planning session took place at the beginning of the week. Everyone from the development team came to Berlin to participate in an inhouse workshop where they were devising a plan for the future. As a result, 2 new milestone goals were added to the Github repository. Since then Red Eyes Testnet2 has been reached, which was announced as the new version release, Ceteris Paribus.

Red Eyes Testnet3 is the next milestone goal to be reached. Some of the work towards reaching it was already done. The main difference between Testnet2 and Testnet3 milestone is that Testnet3 milestone affects smart contracts as well. That’s why the Testnet3 milestone will require redeployment of smart contracts once open issues inside it are sorted out.

There are still open issues in the Red Eyes milestone goal. Those will most probably be added to some future milestone goal that will be planned for before Red Eyes as well. As I already said, all issues discovered will be addressed and deployed to testnet before the team feels Raiden is ready for mainnet.

As expected, Icalo release showed itself as a great tool for finding issues and places in code that need some change. A number of issues were already addressed, but there’s still some work required before everything is ready for the mainnet.

*Raiden releases

There are several ways one can choose to version their software. The Raiden team decided to follow SemVer (Semantic Versioning). According to SemVer, releases are represented with 3 numbers; {major}.{minor}.{patch}. In the current alpha phase of development, the team’s using minor to signify breaking changes.

Conclusion

A very interesting and exciting week of testing, if you missed any of the action I’d highly recommend checking out some of the discussion on the github where you can follow the collaboration around the issues. 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!