Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 37. Hope everyone’s having a good week! In this weeks update we’ll cover the latest testnet snapshot, which enabled support for contract deployment on additional testnets. We’ll also look into the usual Github activity and progress.

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Raiden v0.13.0 - “Gypsy Mushroom”

Gypsy Mushroom is the codename for the latest Raiden Testnet release. It’s a compatibility breaking release which uses the newest version of Smart Contracts (v0.5.1), alters the database format and contains a breaking change in the UDP transport protocol.

The most important changes this week in terms of security are fixes for two critical severity bugs. The first critical severity bug fixed is correct handling of mediated transfers. Previously a recipient of mediated transfer wasn’t checking if the secret was already registered onchain. With the new release, a recipient will ignore the transfer if that recipient finds the secret registered already in the secret registry. The second critical bug fixed was present in the handling of lock expired message.

If you have no clue what were the bugs, don’t worry. Both of them were very deep in the Raiden protocol and require expert level knowledge of the protocol to be completely understood. However, if you want to learn more about what is exactly going on under the hood in Raiden protocol, you can check out Lefteris' presentation from Off The Chain 2018.

The biggest feature in Gypsy Mushroom is support for the Kovan and Rinkeby testnets. Until now, Raiden was only available on Ropsten testnet. Short explanation of different Ethereum test networks (taken from this medium article) is:

• Ropsten: A proof-of-work blockchain that most closely resembles Ethereum; you can easily mine faux-Ether.
• Kovan: A proof-of-authority blockchain, started by the Parity team. Ether can’t be mined; it has to be requested.
• Rinkeby: A proof-of-authority blockchain, started by the Geth team. Ether can’t be mined; it has to be requested.

By releasing Raiden contracts on all the most popular testnets, Raiden development team will be able to further expand their testing and track down potential bugs squirming inside the code.

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Development progress

Milestone ‘Red Eyes Testnet 13’ had been loaded up with 32 issues this week. The development team addressed 20 of those and they were all released as a part of Gypsy Mushroom release this Friday.

All of the infrastructure related issues were solved, as well as most of the bugs. Remaining open issues are mostly related to improvements of a custom testing tool, Scenario Player. We can expect those issues will be moved to the Red Eyes Testnet 14 milestone, which was already created in preparation for the upcoming week.

The Raiden team further expanded their participation in Hacktoberfest 2018 by tagging more issues with a hacktoberfest tag. This decision triggered increased interest in Raiden by outside developers in search for their free T-shirt, since the rules of Hacktoberfest are that “to get a shirt, you must make five pull requests (PRs) between October 1–31 in any timezone…to any public repository on GitHub”.

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Conclusion

To finish off this weeks update, the main chunk of this week was searching and fixing bugs in the Raiden code and enabling testing on the Kovan and Rinkeby testnets. There was a consensus issue on the Ropsten testnet Constantinople hard fork so that might have been good timing! The team will probably need to make hotfixes related to Ropsten as the week starts out. Thanks to everyone for the ongoing support from the community of this update and the help with making it.

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Cheers!