Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 47. A special update this week since we’ve made it through a very significant milestone, Raiden Network Red Eyes was released on the Ethereum mainnet. So, in this Weekly Update we’ll go through where we came from between the announcement of the milestone and now. We’ll also cover the changes in the release and the usual Github activity.

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Raiden Red Eyes release

Earlier this year, on April 17th, the Raiden Development Update introduced the public to two major milestones in Raiden’s development progress, the Red Eyes and Ithaca releases. Lefteris elaborated on them a couple weeks after in his presentation at the EDCON conference in Toronto. The general plan was to release Red Eyes first which would contain a fully working Raiden client and transport layer, but none of the planned auxiliary services (pathfinding and monitoring services). A little more than two months after the conference, on July 18th, Raiden was released on the Ropsten testnet for the first time. The Icalo release marked the beginning of a five-month long testing period, during which 21 weekly testnet releases would be made and hundreds of bugs resolved. Finally, on December 21st, the Red Eyes release was made, making Raiden publicly available on the Ethereum mainnet for the first time.

Alongside the code release on github, a medium article explaining everything about the Red Eyes was introduced as well. We encourage everyone interested in trying out Red Eyes to first carefully read the article in order to better understand what Red Eyes is and what limitations it imposes. The documentation is updated with a Red Eyes Mainnet Tutorial also.

Red Eyes release marks the beginning of the bug bounty period. Currently, only Raiden’s smart contracts are eligible for the bounty and bugs found will be rewarded with up to $10,000 in RDN. Reporting of unknown bugs in Raiden client python code is encouraged as well because even though the client isn’t currently in the scope of the bug bounty, reporting of any bugs inside it has a potential of being awarded with a bounty. Please make sure to follow the submission process as outlined on the bug bounty website and respect the responsible disclosure clause.

The growth of the first token network on Ethereum mainnet can be tracked in Raiden Explorer. It provides insight into very interesting statistical data of WETH token network and complete visualization of the network.

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Raiden v0.100.1 - “Red Eyes”

The Raiden client was under a feature lock for several weeks prior to the Red Eyes release, Therefore, no additional features were introduced in Red Eyes release itself, only a number of bug fixes.

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Development progress

Reaching the Red Eyes milestone has been the primary development goal ever since it was first introduced. However, some parts of the codebase have been ready for the release before others and to prevent unnecessary lockup of those parts they were progressed further.

That is why inside the smart contract repository Ithaca Testnet 01 milestone has already been created and work towards it has started. User stories inside the pathfinding and monitoring services projects have been created several weeks ago and part of the development team started on their implementation. Since the code in these projects wasn’t updated for some time, minor cleaning had to be done as well. With focus shifting towards Ithaca milestone, which will introduce auxiliary services, there will be more development activity in these projects.

Complete continuation of development progress can be expected after the holiday season has ended.

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Conclusion

Wrapping up Weekly Update 47, having followed the Raiden github closely for almost a year now it’s been amazing to watch the Raiden dev team coordinate so efficiently during testing and I’d like to put a shout-out to all the devs and the amount of hard work and late nights they’ve put in to get to this stage, especially in the last couple months where github commits have gone to the moon. That’s it for the Weekly Update for this exciting milestone, Merry Christmas everyone! Feel free to leave a comment and me or /u/mat7ias will respond to help the best we can.

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Cheers!