Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 38. This week we’ll be looking into the recent Raiden Network article focused on an in-depth explanation of Raiden’s transport, the two latest testnet snapshots and check out the latest github activity. Let’s dig in!

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Raiden Transport Explained - the new Medium article

In order for Raiden to work, nodes participating in the network need to exchange messages between them. Rules about how exactly these messages are exchanged is enforced by the underlying communication protocol.

Raiden’s current communication protocol of choice is Matrix and in the latest Medium article the reasons behind choosing Matrix are explained in-depth. The topic is very technical and if you don’t know at least the basics about communication networks and protocols it’ll be challenging to understand it fully. For this purpose, I released a Reddit post that tries to explain most of the technical lingo used in the article (link).

“Raiden Transport Explained” is a part of the tech deep dive series aimed at the more technical part of the community. If you’re having any trouble understanding some part of the article, just leave a comment and I will give my best to explain it in the simplest way I know. The full article is found here.

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Raiden v0.13.1 - “Flawless Unicorn”

Flawless Unicorn is the codename for one of the two releases made this week. The patch is a hotfix release for the Raiden v0.13.0 - Gypsy Mushroom.

The latest patch contains two bug fixes, one of which was the key reason why the development team decided it was necessary to publish a fix before the usual end of the week release. During the implementation of a feature that enabled Raiden to work on all 3 most popular test chains a breaking bug was introduced. The source of it was quickly discovered, fixed and published on Monday in Flawless Unicorn release.

Making a hotfix release on top of the nightly releases was necessary since the nightly releases are snapshots of master branch, if a release is broken a new one has to be made.

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Raiden v0.14.0 - “Astir”

Astir is the latest weekly Raiden testnet release. It contains one feature and a number of bug fixes. Part of the developer team worked late into the night on Friday and spent good portion of Saturday morning to make this release happen and I would like to thank them for the great deal of commitment they’ve put into making this release and the project in general.

The new feature was to adjust a CLI flag (naming system) that determines if Raiden is running on the Ethereum mainnet or on one of the testnets. The development team decided that old CLI flag could lead to confusion so they decided to re-write it.

The critical bug and most of the medium severity bugs that were fixed are related to expired locks. During the mediated transfer in Raiden, locks are generated to ensure the successful execution of a payment. These locks have an expiration period and if the transfer isn’t successfully executed in a given time frame then they must be removed. During then tests and internal audit, the development team discovered that this mechanic could potentially be exploited. They implemented changes required to prevent this potential attack vector. If you want to learn more about it, you can find the complete specification here.

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Development progress

The development team continued to work on testing and internal auditing of Raiden. As a result, a significant number of bugs have been fixed in the Astir release made at the end of the week.

Red Eyes Testnet 14 milestone contained 28 issues. All the most important ones, related to Raiden protocol have been addressed and successfully resolved. The pull requests for the issues that weren’t ready to be merged in time to make it to the new released are ready for review and will be reviewed in the upcoming week.

Looking at the issues currently opened, we can see there’s an issue for one minor severity bug and one for the medium severity bug, which have already begun to be worked on. However, the development team is constantly testing every part of the protocol and they might discover that some parts require more work to be completely ready.

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Conclusion

This week’s focus has been on keeping the community updated and providing information on Matrix transport and continued Red Eyes testing, now spread across the three Ethereum test networks (Kovan, Rinkeby and Ropsten). It’s been a busy week for the team with two new testnet snapshots and ensuring testing continues as efficiently as possible. Again a special thanks to everyone in the Raiden community and the help for this update.

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Cheers!