Hey everyone!

Welcome to 32nd Weekly Update. It seems that ever since Raiden was released on the testnet there are more and more updates and news to cover in the weekly update. These past few days have hands down been the most eventful we’ve had in the history of weekly updates. The development team participated in 4 different events, the newest weekly testnet release is full of numerous important features, bug fixes and the general development plan for the upcoming week was already made. Let’s dive in and check exactly what I am talking about!

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Berlin Blockchain Week and Copenhagen Events

It’s already a well-known fact that the development team loves participating in conferences. Traveling long distances to participate in smaller conferences is sometimes just not worth it, but if there is any blockchain related event in Berlin, you can be sure the development team will be interested to attend.

Berlin Blockchain Week is a community-organized initiative, it spans between the 5th and 11th of September. The main focus of the whole initiative is education and the best part is there’s content for everyone. From complete beginners to seasoned devs; everyone can find something interesting. As a part of the initiative a number of different events were organized all across Berlin (you can find the full list here). Raiden development team members participated in 3 different events that were part of Berlin Blockchain Week.

Augusto shared Raiden’s part of the story on Wednesday at Mass Adoption & Usecases at Full Node. The goal of this event was to raise awareness on what is being done to generate a more dev & user-friendly Web 3.0 by showcasing 3 different projects (Status, Golem, Raiden). The highlight of Raiden’s part of the demonstration was Raiden’s new webUI. Augusto as well took the opportunity to talk about the current status of the project and plans for the future. While we wait for a video of the whole event, you can find several pretty cool pictures here.

Second event Raiden development team participated at was Scaling & Interoperability panel. Lefteris teamed up with Fredrik Harrysson (Parity Technologies), Philip Stehlik (Centrifuge) and Igor Barinov (POA Network) to discuss scalability, interoperability and what dApp developers should have in mind when making use of scaling solutions.

The last event from Berlin Blockchain Week Raiden was part of was ETHBerlin Hackaton. Loredana and Lefteris were in the roles of mentors at the event. Some of the participants were working with Raiden and in the process, they were able to find a small issue with the documentation that was already reported here.

In Copenhagen at the Techfestival Jacob was a part of the discussion about the impact of the decentralized web on the society.

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Raiden v0.8.0 - “rising_edge”

Codename rising_edge is the latest weekly Raiden testnet release. In addition to being a compatibility breaking release, smart contracts had to be redeployed as there were some changes made to them.

The team worked long hours on Friday because they wanted to make a release in time for the ETH Berlin Hackaton. They were able to finish everything they wanted to include in the new release and around 11:30pm Berlin local time release was made.

rising_edge contains almost all the big features team was working on for the last several weeks. Improved error handling in Raiden client, WAL upgradeability and handling of expired locks in the channel are all part of the newest release. In addition to these major features more work has been done on the webUI and several minor bugs were fixed.

A new great feature rising_edge introduces are nightly releases. Before rising_edge, fresh binaries were created for every new release at the end of the week. Sometimes changes to the release process would introduce bugs and then binaries would have to be created manually. The new feature creates both Linux and macOS binaries every night. That way the release process of Raiden is tested every day.

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Development progress

As I already said, several features completed as a part of Red Eyes Testnet 8 milestones were pretty challenging. Looking at the list of issues that were in the Red Eyes Testnet 8, almost all the most complex ones are completed. One I would point out as a complex one that wasn’t ready by the end of this week is stress tests. You can find out more about stress tests in last week’s GIT update.

The general plan for the upcoming week can be seen in the new milestone. We can see that finishing stress tests and implementation of monitoring for Matrix servers have the highest priority. Work on matrix, documentation and some optimizations are planned in addition to these major features.Many open pull requests ready for review are waiting for the team on Monday. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them are the direct result of the ETHBerlin Hackathon.

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Conclusion

With three events, a well organised hackathon at EthBerlin and the next testnet snapshot with the new features it’s been an intense week. Thanks again to you guys for the support and also the contributors to this update! If you have any questions, leave a comment and me or /u/Mat7ias will get back to you as soon as we have an answer.

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Cheers!