Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 44. This week we’ll be looking into a recent Layer 2 researchers call that was collaborated between a number of projects and that Raiden dev Augusto participated in. This researchers call is the 6th in a series that’s growing to help projects progress faster by collaborating with one another. This update will also look into the usual github activity of the raiden repository. Let’s dive in!

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State Channels Researchers Calls

Blockchain as a technology is still very young, there’s a lot of room for improvements and optimizations. Additionally, layer 2 technology is even younger and there are even more unsolved problems that need more work and research (one of the most famous ones is a routing algorithm inside the channel network). Several projects working on the state channel technology recognized this, they’ve decided to organize regular video calls where they discuss ideas and share knowledge gathered while working on their implementation of state channels. Every video call is recorded and shared on youtube.

Raiden’s developer Augusto joined 6th State Channels Researchers Call and introduced Raiden to the rest of the researchers. The discussion addressed a few interesting points, including counterparty issue discussion, for example “how can I make sure my counterparty has received my payment?” Augusto responded to that issue stating;

we do need to send messages in order because state changes need to be applied in order, otherwise we don’t have agreement between the nodes. A participant can apply multiple state changes on that participant’s half of a channel without waiting on the acknowledgement of the partner’s half.

The research team goes much deeper in this discussion so I would recommend checking out the video. But as always I will be happy to elaborate on specifics in the comments.

Active collaboration and open conversation between projects is very important because it’ll be proportionally less difficult to solve the problems everyone in the field is facing if everyone works together. The State Channel Researchers Calls is the extension of an open collaboration between L2 projects which we could already see in The Future of LAYER 2 and other L2 focused events.

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Raiden v0.18.0 - “Farnsworth”

Farnsworth is the codename of the latest Raiden testnet release. It contains all the updates to the codebase completed in the last two weeks, since “Zigzag street” was introduced.

The most important updates are the 2 bug fixes for potential security exploits and fixes in message handling upon Raiden client restart. Potential security exploits were discovered by recent addition to the development team, Yoichi. It’s nice to see his onboarding process is going great and he’s already started making valuable contributions to the project.

The Farnsworth release temporarily restricts users from running Raiden on the mainnet until the Red Eyes release is ready.

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Development progress

After a week spent planning future development goals, the development team continued working towards a successful Red Eyes release. As we already mentioned, 3 very important issues were sorted out and a new release was introduced on Friday.

Apart from bug fixing, significant progress was made towards finalizing integration of the new CI tool. Currently, both Travis and CircleCI are being used, but a complete switch to CircleCI should be made soon.

The Raiden’s spec repository which has implementation details for most of the codebase and the onboarding guide which helps new developers to better understand Raiden protocol was revisioned and updated. If you are interested, you can find the onboarding guide here, alongside all the available documentation.

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Conclusion

To finish off Weekly Update 44, for anyone technically inclined the 6th State Channels Researchers Call was very every educational. In terms of Raiden Network progress Farnsworth of bug fixes. As always thank you so much to the community for the support and also everyone contributing to this update. Feel free to leave a comment and I will respond or /u/mat7ias if he beats me to it!

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Cheers!