Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 35. Hope everyone’s enjoying their weekend! For this week’s post we’re covering the new Raiden Explorer the team is working on and the Raiden Network testing improvements and progress contained in the testnet snapshot released this week.

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Raiden Explorer

Raiden Explorer is a website the development team is building that provides useful links, visualization, statistical overview and metrics of the Raiden network. At the moment it is still a work in progress, but you can check out current state on this link.

The Raiden Explorer uses data from the available token networks on Ropsten testnet as the visual. There are more that 150 token networks registered in total and support, you’re able to scroll through the stats for each individual token with the arrows. If you are unsure about token networks and what it means for Raiden, leave a comment and we’ll give our best to explain it to you.

The visualization shows an interactive overview of the whole network. A circle represents an individual address that are part of the network while links between them represent channels. Different channel states are colour coded to show settled, closed and open channels (purple, red and green, respectively) while bigger size of the circle represents larger amount of tokens deposited to the node.

The Raiden Explorer has educational purpose as well. On top of the website various useful links are provided. By following these links a user can learn everything about using the Raiden network.

Once Raiden is available on the Ethereum mainnet, the Raiden Explorer will be a great tool to follow the growth of the network and to educate potential users.

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Raiden v0.11.0 - “Protego Maxima”

Protego Maxima is the latest weekly Raiden testnet release. This week’s main focus;

1. Fixing minor bugs and testing of all aspects of Raiden, especially the Raiden client.
2. Bugs and tests in line with those pointed out as the remaining tasks that need to be completed for Raiden to be ready for the alpha mainnet release, discussed in the latest medium article.

The development team spent significant time developing and perfecting internal tooling that—once finished—will enable them to test many different scenarios they think might happen in real-word usage of Raiden.

An issue related to flaky stress test was finished this week as well. Stress on the Raiden client is simulated by executing many small parallel transfers between nodes. If the Raiden client manages to process all of them without crashing it’s considered that test was passed successfully.

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Development progress

The internal testing tool that the team focused the most this week was the “Scenario Player”. The Scenario Player is capable of reading commands from a file, executing them and asserting that commands were processed successfully by the client. Creating tests in this fashion is a technique used to make writing tests easier and optimize progress.

The features added to the Scenario Player this week will provide support for writing different scenarios. Writing scenarios is much easier task than building the tool itself, so the work done during the week is a great investment for the future.

In the upcoming week we can expect that the development team will continue to focus on tests and bugs to prepare everything for a successful alpha Red Eyes mainnet release.

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Conclusion

To finish off this weeks update, the explorer was an exciting addition to the project. Don’t miss there are arrows to scroll through the data sets for all the token networks. Protego Maxima (v0.11.0) contains a number of important bug fixes from testing and a great reference (for anyone who picked up on it). Thanks again for the support you guys give and also the help from braintbot! Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you feel something wasn’t clear enough, always happy to answer.

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Cheers!