Hey everyone!

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Welcome to the 33rd Weekly Update. Now that Berlin Blockchain Week is over, there aren’t any non-development topics to include in this update. Instead this week’s will be development focused, going into the recent github activity and covering the improvements included in the new testnet release. Let’s begin!

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Raiden v0.9.0 - “Carradine”

Carradine is the 9th and latest weekly Raiden testnet release. It contains features and bug fixes completed as a part of the Red Eyes Testnet 9 Milestone.

The features released as a part of Carradine aim to improve different parts of the project. The pinned versions of all dependencies should prevent anymore problems with producing binaries, the addition of timestamps to internal events will help with sorting events in clients and debugging. Also exposed payment history in the webUI is a great feature to have for all the users.

Another new feature is the implementation of different gas price strategies that adapt to the Ethereum network conditions and offer more control over gas usage inside the Raiden client. Available gas options are:

• fast - transactions are usually mined within 60 seconds
• normal - transactions are usually mined within 5 minutes
• fixed - a fixed amount of gas is used for all transactions

This feature is very important in relation to throughput, such as cases where the Ethereum network is clogged or gas prices are low. When gas prices are low, it’ll prevent unnecessary gas spending while in scenarios when gas prices are high it can help make sure that transactions are mined within a reasonable timeframe whenever Raiden interacts with the main-chain.

The bugs fixed as a part of Carradine are all minor to medium severity bugs. It’s very nice to see that several bugs were reported by people outside the development team. Every bug reported during the last week was fixed and it shouldn’t be present in Carradine version.

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Development progress

After last week, where several members of the development team spent a significant part of the week at different events (you can read all about it in Weekly Update 32), this week they went all out on development. The result of that in terms of numbers are: 140 commits merged to master including 7200 edited lines of code, released in Carradine.

A handful of issues weren’t ready on Friday in time for release so they were added to the new milestone goal - Red Eyes Testnet 10. The pull request with fixes for some of those issues are almost ready, but the team decided not to force it and risk potential bugs in the new release.

Throughout the week, plans for the new features were added to the issue list on github. After a number of enquiries on reddit for a Windows Raiden client, an issue addressing it’s support was opened by the development team discussing a Windows specific installer. Improvements of the webUI were also planned. With all the planned features implemented Raiden should provide all the functionalities and information user would ever need via webUI.

A stress test was completed and merged during the last week. It’s still a little flaky (a “flaky” test is referring to one that sometimes passes and sometimes fails under same conditions), but there is already an open issue describing the problem here.

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Conclusion

So there was heavy focus on development for Raiden this week, in contrast to last week’s multiple events which the team use to spread awareness about the protocol and the potential benefits of integrating it with their dApps. As usual, thanks to you guys for your support in the GIT update series and thanks to the those helping. Leave any Raiden comment/questions about the GIT activity (or anything Raiden related that you’re interested in) and I’ll respond the best I can!

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Cheers!