Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 45. There’s a number of interesting developments for us to cover for this week’s update, a big part of which relates to ETHSingapore. At these types of events you have some of the smartest minds in Ethereum walking around and mentoring groups. They offer attendees with the unique opportunity to learn about projects from the creators of these projects themselves. We’ll also be going over the Github activity update, as usual, let’s begin!

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ETHSingapore

ETHSingapore (Dec 7th - Dec 9th) is ASEAN’s first Ethereum hackathon, a part of the ETHGlobal 2018 series. Raiden was one of the sponsors of the event and hosted API awards. Members of Raiden’s development team, Loredana and Jacob, were at the event where they mentored hacker’s in building their projects and participated in some of the activities at the event.

The first day of the event started off with an interesting panel titled "Scaling blockchains in 2019 and beyond". Speakers at the panel were: Ameen Soleimani (Spankchain), Dong Mo (Celer), Jacob Stenum (Raiden), Liam Horne (Counterfactual), Yaoqi Jia (Zilliqa), Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation). Unfortunately, the panel wasn’t streamed, so we don’t know which topics were discussed in detail, but we can assume what the main topic was by the title of the panel.

After the panel, the livestream went up for the opening ceremony. The first section of the opening ceremony was an interview with Vitalik Buterin. During the interview, Vitalik gave insight in his usual Ethereum related activities and discussed the importance of collaboration between different projects in the crypto space. The opening ceremony continued with the short talk by the organizers and concluded with a series of short presentations by a number of the sponsors. With the opening ceremony done, hackers were ready to start familiarizing themselves with projects and API’s they had interest in.

As a part of the API award, hackers were competing for two prizes. For the most innovative use case prize was $2000 equivalent in RDN while for best UI/UX $1000 in RDN. To help hackers better understand how Raiden works and to spur some ideas, Jacob and Loredana hosted "Get started Buidling on Raiden" workshop and Loredana created Rock-Paper-Scissors application built on top of Raiden.

Winners were announced at the closing ceremony. The winners of the API prizes (timestamp) were:

• For the most innovative use case built using the Raiden Network API - Raiden-dooh; An advertising marketplace built on top of Raiden - Pay per second that you advertise to a viewer and potentially other advertisers could also pay a higher fee and have their advertisement shown instead.
• For the best UI/UX using the Raiden API - Cryptogrannies; A simple way to use Near Field Communication (NFC) cards to pay with Raiden.

Congratulations to the winners and thank you for building on top of Raiden. Special thanks for Loredana and Jacob for representing Raiden at the event!

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Raiden v0.18.1 - “Hawker”

Hawker is the codename for the latest weekly Raiden testnet release. As a part of the release, numerous bugs were fixed.

One of the bugs fixed is a long-standing issue (#2779) that’s sometimes caused hanging transfers. Reliably reproducing the issue and fixing it was quite challenging. Ulrich, with the assistance of other team members, stood up to the challenge and was able to get to the bottom of it.

The Hawker release is a valuable step forward towards a successful Red Eyes release.

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Development Progress

Apart from fixing bugs and releasing Hawker, the development team spent a lot of time making minor—but valuable—changes to the codebase and updating documentation.

The WebUI code was decoupled from the Raiden Client, unused code for the direct transfers was removed from the Raiden client repository. Now, writing unit tests is simplified with the newly introduced factories and parts of the codebase were adjusted to be compliant with the mypy type checker. Using mypy during the development prevents accidentally introducing bugs that are difficult and potentially very time consuming to find, so it’s very a good investment for the future.

In other development progress, hackers at ETHSingapore helped with the investigation of one of the known bugs, but it is very positive that they weren’t able to find any new ones while they were working with Raiden.

Eight open issues were already added to the Red Eyes Testnet 19 milestone and are waiting to be tackled by the development team in the upcoming week.

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Conclusion

To close Weekly Update 45, I’d like to put out a quick thanks to the developers of Raiden-dooh and Cryptogrannies for their contributions. A lot of exciting development came out of the ETHSingapore weekend for the Ethereum space and moving collaboration beyond that. Thanks again for the support from the community, and the help with the Weekly Update. Feel free to leave a comment and me or /u/mat7ias will respond to help the best we can.

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Cheers!