Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 30. Apart from another successful week in terms of development and testing a great panel from Dappcon has had its video posted online. I highly recommend watching the full panel since it’s really well structured and insightful but /u/Mat7ias also has something for you guys that might be short on time and the end of this week’s post!

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Raiden v0.6.0 - “Metamorphosis”

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Metamorphosis is the 6th and latest Raiden weekly testnet release. The highlight of this release is a re-designed web user interface. It’s highly recommended to upgrade your version of Raiden to Metamorphosis because it also contains fixes for several bugs that might give you trouble otherwise.

If you’ve been following the Raiden releases, you’ve probably noticed that after compatibility breaking release you were required to remove your local database before upgrading. Metamorphosis doesn’t require this step anymore since the databases are now versioned in the same way releases are. Upon upgrading to the new release a new database will be created and you’ll be able to continue using Raiden as normal. This is a great new feature because it makes upgrading between versions of Raiden more user-friendly.

A feature has been added to the WebUI that shows a notification to the user upon a channel being opened with them or a payment being made. This redesign is very intuitive and follows UX/UI best practices. The new WebUI provides a wholesome experience which should allow the user to control everything regarding their node with ease.

All in all, a big step forward in improving the user experience and user friendliness of Raiden was made this week. From one of Lefteris’ presentation at a conference a couple months back we could have seen that the development team values user experience highly and consider it an integral part to the future crypto space.

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Development progress

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The subsequent milestone goal for the upcoming week has been added to the Raiden repository. Currently, it counts 10 issues targeting many different parts of the codebase.

Some of the issues already added are ones that didn’t make it into the Metamorphosis release, but were addressed and solved in the meantime. Pull requests for several of them are ready for review and a number of them are also already work in progress. It’s likely that more issues will be added to the new milestone goal during the planning session at the beginning of the week.

Several weeks back a new repository titled status-page was added to the Raiden Github. The status-page repository contains code for a website that will provide a complete overview of Raiden Network to everyone. Looking at the code and open issues we can see that it will provide nice visualizations of the network and useful statistics. Lot of work in this repository has already been done, but there is still some more left to be done. I am sure it will be a great resource to follow the growth and progress of the Raiden Network in the future.

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Conclusion

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There we are for this week or are we... In terms of development and testing progress we, had the next Raiden Network testnet version (Metamorphosis) released with plans for the upcoming release already underway. The development team is also preparing for parts of the mainnet release that aren’t directly codebase related, such as the status page. Thank you to the everyone at brainbot who help contribute to this update and also especially you guys in the community for the support. We’re not done yet!

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State Channels and Plasma Panel

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For anyone that missed the Dappcon panel live stream that Raiden participated last month and hasn’t had time to watch the video of it that came out this week, /u/Mat7ias made a list of the main questions and timestamps for each one for you guys. The devs on the panel give some excellent answers to those!

• What do Plasma and State Channels having in common?
• What are the trade-offs between State Channels and Plasma?
• What are examples of applications that are better built on top of Plasma/State Channels?
• If we would compare them in terms of the dimensions of latency, decentralization, throughput?
• What’s the difference between Plasma and side-chains?
• Is there something you have to use right now, to download and use it as a building block for applications?
• How much harder is it to build off-chain instead of writing smart contracts which are deployed on-chain?
• Question from the audience; is it correct that in Plasma I can send some tokens to someone who’s not yet participating in the network and in State Channels that wouldn’t work?

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Cheers!