Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 49. In the update for this week, we’ll be looking at a couple of relevant articles to Raiden Network, including the Pulse and an interesting critical piece about watchtower scalability. Additionally, with the 2nd weeks of Red Eyes mainnet behind us, we’ll be covering some of the Github activity and challenges being tackled. Let’s dig in!

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Raiden Pulse #3

The Raiden Pulse is a series of medium articles which summarizes everything Raiden related (development updates, events, announcements and more) on a bi-monthly basis. This week, the Raiden team released Raiden Pulse #3 which covers “all things Raiden” in the last two months of 2018.

In addition to providing a brief coverage of the Red Eyes release, development progress, events the Raiden team participated at and new team members that joined in the last two months, it contains two interesting announcements. The first announcement is Raiden’s participation at the EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) this year. Currently, only Augusto is announced to be at the conference, but most likely few other team members will join him in giving an update on the Raiden Network’s status and future outlook. The second announcement is that a new development update which will cover the way towards the Ithaca release is in the making and will be shared soon.

In the meantime you can learn more about what monitoring services are, how they will work and some of the future challenges by reading Sam Aiken’s (/u/SamAiken) article on the topic.

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CryptoBotWars

In her spare time, while she wasn’t developing arguably one of the most solid and bug-free smart contracts in Ethereum ecosystem, Loredana decided to create CryptoBotWars. CryptoBotWars is a rock-paper-scissors game where the player does micropayments on the Raiden Network in order to choose a move for a preferred CryptoBot.

If you wanted to try out yourself how Raiden’s Red Eyes release is working on the Ethereum mainnet, but found it a little dull to send payments between nodes for testing purposes, now you can join the all out war that’s raging in the galaxy far, and even farther away.

The game is a continuation of the rock-paper-scissors game created for the ETHSingapore hackathon Jacob and Loredana were mentoring in the early December. Please read the disclaimer and instructions carefully and may the tokens be with you!

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Development progress

With the Red Eyes live on the Ethereum mainnet and the ongoing bug bounty, the development team introduced some changes to the usual activities we became accustomed to in the months prior to the release. The focus switched from the Raiden client and much more attention has been shifted to the monitoring and pathfinding services.

The number of non-critical bugs in the Raiden client, that were known to the development team before the Red Eyes release are now being investigated and fixes for them are progressively introduced. The new milestone goal titled "Next Release" contains a list of open issues development team aims to solve before the release following Red Eyes.

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Conclusion

To finish up Weekly Update 49, there’s been a couple of minor bug discoveries since the mainnet release (which is expected and good for improving UI) but nothing critical, which is what’s most relevant to the security of the protocol. If you’re testing and run into issues make sure to head over to the Raiden gitter channel where the dev team is actively giving support. As always thank you to everyone for the support, leave a comment if there are any open questions you have about testing or Raiden in general. Also a quick thank you to the Raiden team contributing to this update.

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Cheers!