Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 48. As of writing this update, it’s the last day of 2018 so let’s cover this year’s activities and progress. We’ll also focus on the growth and of course the Red Eyes mainnet bug bounty progress. Let’s dig in!

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Raiden in 2018

At the beginning of the year, the main development focus was µRaiden. It’s bug bounty started in late 2017 and was finished in the early 2018. With a stable release of µRaiden live on the Ethereum mainnet, the development focus switched to Raiden.

Although work on Raiden started all the way back in 2015, it still required a lot of work. In the Raiden Development Update from February, big refactoring that should enable recoverability of the Raiden client and upgrade to Python 3 was announced with The Swimming Goat. Two months afterward, a new medium article was released following a coordinated planning session, introducing us to the new roadmap with two big milestones, Red Eyes and Ithaca. The Red Eyes milestone was the first major goal, the four major development goals for it were:

• Recoverability of Raiden client
• Smart contract refactoring
• Core protocol changes
• Revisioned transport layer (integration of Matrix protocol)

In July, Raiden was released on the Ropsten testnet with the Icalo release. Tedious testing and intense development, during which new testnet releases were coming on an almost weekly basis, culminated with a successful Red Eyes mainnet release on December 21st.

Apart from developing Raiden, the development team has spent a lot of time promoting Raiden at conferences and hackathons all around the world. Some of the events the development team was a part of in the 2018 are: Asseth, Edcon 2018, DAPPCON 2018, Ethereum Asia Tour, DevCon4, ETHSingapore and many more.

Speaking of the team, it grew substantially in 2018 (including some of the team’s collaborators). A number of talented individuals joined the team, many of which played a crucial role in building Raiden and bringing it to the Ethereum mainnet. A collaboration with scholars and researchers started this year, will ensure Raiden protocol is up to date with latest findings in the field.

Additionally brainbot, the company contributing to the development of the Raiden Network, recently released a Year In Review where they summarized some of 2018’s achievements, progress and team growth.

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First week of the Red Eyes release

At the time of writing of this update, the Raiden Red Eyes release is live on the Ethereum mainnet for a little longer than a week. In that time no critical bugs were found and the WETH token network on the Ethereum mainnet is steadily growing. 1 WETH in total network deposits was reached just several days after the release. You can follow growth of the network here.

Issues regarding using Infura to run the Raiden client were better researched and work towards addressing them has already started. Those issues do not affect the Red Eyes release because using local Ethereum node is one of the security requirements for the release.

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Conclusion

To conclude the Weekly Update 48, we’ve seen some exciting development progress in 2018 and come a long way in a year. Some of the most notable development milestones this year would include: The Swimming Goat, Icalo and the mainnet release Red Eyes. That’s it for 2018, looking forward to keeping you guys updated with the latest activity going into 2019! Thanks again for the community’s support during the year and to the support given for this update. As always leave a comment if you have any questions about this update or 2018 in general.

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Cheers!