Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 50. An exciting update this week since we’ve reached half-century of the Weekly Update! For this update we’ll be looking at some of the events/workshops that took place during the week relating to Raiden. The mainnet bounty continues so we’ll be covering some of the Github activity and issues the team is pushing through.Without further ado, let’s dive in!

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Raiden at events

Participating at events has always been a big priority for Raiden and the team. In 2018 Raiden was represented at more than 15 events where the team updated the community about current activities and plans for the future, showcasing development progress by organizing and mentoring workshops and hackathons. With increasing interest in Raiden by the development community, there’s been more noticeable attendance for more events where Raiden will be one of the topics.

We’ve already mentioned in the last update that Augusto alongside a couple other team members will give an update on Raiden Network’s status and future outlook at the EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) this year. Additionally, on the 4th of February, a smaller event titled CryptoMonday | Raiden - 2nd Layer Scaling on Ethereum will take place in Cologne (Germany).

In the past week, two Raiden workshops were organized by the technology enthusiasts. Blockchain Hands On workshop in Geneva replicated workshop organized by the Raiden’s development team at Devcon4. The initiating organizer was one of the attendees of the original Devon workshop. In other events this week, the attendees of Raiden Deep Dive workshop in Sydney took a closer look at Raiden’s smart contracts and message flow between nodes in the network. Lefteris joined the workshop via video and helped with answering questions.

Future events are always being organized and we will share as information on them is available, so stay tuned!

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Development progress

The Red Eyes release has been live on Ethereum mainnet for over 3 weeks, in that time no critical bugs or vulnerabilities have been found and the WETH token network is slowly growing. While closely monitoring the behaviour of the Raiden protocol on mainnet, the team continues to work towards the next releases and Ithaca milestone.

Auxiliary services (part of the Ithaca release) will require a dedicated smart contracts for their normal workflow. Work on the new smart contracts has already been started as well as on the services themselves. A significant amount of attention is given to updating the code structure which should prevent unnecessary code duplication and enable simpler, bug free implementation of the new features. Several open questions in the specification of the new features are under discussion and consensus about them should be reached soon.

The new release candidate of the Raiden client has been made on Friday, but it is meant only for testing. Once a release candidate is sufficiently tested it may become a release.

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Conclusion

To conclude Weekly Update 50, this week the bug bounty continues with some progress and a new release candidate, which aren’t for production use but try it out on testnet if you’re interested in contributing to testing (similar to the testnet snapshots). We also saw some interesting events take place and also some to come. As always thank you to to readers of this update and to those contributing to the Raiden project overall.

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Cheers!