Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 40. . Hope everyone who got a chance enjoyed checking out Devcon 4, either from the livestreams or if you were lucky enough to attend in person! This week we’ll be covering Raiden related activities at Devcon and The Future of Layer 2 (organized by Nervos Network and panel host, Mo Dong from Celer Network). We will also go into the usual Github activity.

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Raiden at Devcon4

Devcon is the biggest annual Ethereum conference. The fourth edition of the conference took place in Prague from the 30th of October to 2nd of November. Raiden participated in one event prior to the conference and at the conference held a workshop and a presentation.

The day before Devcon, Nervos network and Celer network organized an event fully dedicated to Ethereum L2 titled The Future of LAYER 2: Prague Edition. Almost all of the projects working on second layer solutions for Ethereum were represented at the event by someone from their team in addition to many researchers from the L2 field. Raiden was represented by Jacob.

The most interesting part of the event were two panels; the first one with all the researchers and the second one with representatives from projects building on Ethereum’s L2. The panel discussions were quite long and very resourceful. Some of the key ideas and questions discussed during the panels are:

• “Let’s say L1 is powerful enough to handle all the demand for resources, do we still need L2 solutions in this scenario?” - Consensus across all the panelists was that we would still need L2 because L1 can never be as fast and cheap as L2 due to very core idea of how layers operate
• “L1 is having trouble with adoption, do you think L2 makes it harder or easier to promote adoption of cryptocurrencies?” - Ameen Soleimani, CEO and Co-Founder of SpankChain, response was that in theory L2 should make adoption easier because with L2 you can achieve instant response to user actions in user interface (there’s no mining of transaction), but bad UX (user experience) is keeping people away. Very interesting idea Ameen shared during the panel was that good UX for Dapps starts with the design of smart contracts.
• Both Ameen and Jacob pointed out that due to instability of the Ethereum main chain (L1), L2 projects are suffering. One of the biggest problems is the requirement to wait for 5 confirmation blocks for every onchain transaction.

The panels were for the most part very noob friendly and all the panelists elaborated their ideas clearly. The video from the event is available at this link and if you have time I highly recommend watching it.

Thursday was the big day for Raiden at the Devcon 4. First Lefteris held a presentation as a part of the scalability breakout session and in the afternoon a Raiden hands-on workshop took place.

Lefteris’ presentation was titled “Getting to a production ready payment channel network for Ethereum”. During the presentation he talked about the current state of Raiden’s Red Eyes release, the Raiden protocol and client architecture, and the challenges which the development team is currently tackling to get Raiden to production readiness.

Lefteris revealed how once they moved from testnets to testing Raiden on Ethereum mainnet, everything “blew up”. The root of the problem was instability of the mainchain and currently they are working hard to implement necessary mechanics to ensure the communication with the mainchain is stable enough to support the execution of the Raiden protocol on top of it. Furthermore, he announced that Red Eyes will be a bug bounty release and he invited everyone to help in testing and finding bugs once it’s available. In the last section of the presentation, he pointed out how Raiden will not be production ready until fees, monitoring and pathfinding services are implemented (i.e. Ithaca release).

A video of the presentation is not yet publicly available, but Patrick McCorry made a great twitter thread that contains everything that was said during the presentation.

A few hours after Lefteris’ presentation, Raiden’s hands-on workshop was scheduled. The workshop attendees (and livestream spectators) had the opportunity for added insight on how Raiden works on the testnet and get all their questions answered by Raiden’s development team. The workshop was an overwhelming success and the ‘Mikado’ conference room was packed with developers interested in Raiden. During the workshop a token network with 200 channels was created from scratch. The last part of the workshop was dedicated to a simple game where attendees could participate in a race by sending off-chain transactions via Raiden on the Kovan testnet.

If you wish to see a picture gallery from the workshop, Raiden’s official twitter account documented everything.

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Raiden v0.15.1 - “The Cave”

Even though many team members were at Devcon 4 representing Raiden, a new release was made on Saturday. Codenamed The Cave, it contains a bug fix for one of the bugs discovered while Raiden was being tested on the mainnet.

Nonce is a unique integer value assigned to each on chain transaction. Before the fix, it was possible for the Raiden client to lose track of the nonce value if it was shut down or restarted because transactions that were in the mempool but not yet mined, were not taken into account when calculating the nonce during the restart. With the new release, this won’t be an issue anymore.

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Development progress

Apart from fixing the nonce related bug and making a release, the members of the team that weren’t attending Devcon 4 focused most of the time testing and reporting issues they’ve found in the process. The work towards solving some of those issues was already started, but it was not yet reviewed.

The great news is that as a result of the workshop at Devcon 4, several external developers started participating in Raiden’s development by opening issues and suggesting some changes and improvements.

As the team gets back together on Monday, we can expect them to start dealing with the remaining issues that are keeping Red Eyes from hitting the mainnet.

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Conclusion

In conclusion to Weekly Update 40, hope you all had time to participate in the live workshop. It was definitely an exciting introduction for anyone interested in payment channels or even just layer 2 solutions in general. This weeks testnet release ‘The Cave’ brought a few fixes but it was apparent the main focus for the past week was on making a good impression at Devcon. Thanks again to you in the Raiden community for your ongoing support and everyone at brainbot who helps contribute. As always, I or /u/Mat7ias will be happy to answer any questions in the comments.

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Cheers!