Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 52. This week we’ve reached a total of the first annual amount of the Weekly Update, beginning with the first here! For this update we’ll be focusing on the development update released this week, as well as progress on Github for Red Eyes and towards the path of the Ithaca milestone. Let’s dive in!

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Development Update: The Road towards Ithaca

As development focus switched from the Red Eyes milestone to the Ithaca milestone, the Raiden team decided to release a brief development update introducing key features they are working on. The development update released on the official Medium blog and article is found here.

The article brings a brief high-level overview of MS and PFS which those that followed recent Weekly Updates will be familiar with and additionally introduces a couple of new key concepts of the upcoming Ithaca milestone:

• Raiden service bundle (RSB) registry planned to list all service providers, which offer monitoring and/or pathfinding services.
• Every participant in the network will be able to set their own mediation fees which is paid in the token being transferred in the respective token network

Lastly, the article announces a change in the release strategy. The development team will no longer focus on making as regular testnet releases we got used to during the road towards the Red Eyes release and they will instead make irregular releases which will integrate the new features into the existing mainnet release. Only in exceptional cases (if features or fixes aren’t backwards compatible) will an “Ithaca branch” with additional testnet releases be created.

This development update is the first official update since the development team started working towards the Ithaca milestone. It aims to give a high-level heads up while more details are expected and new features are further developed. Considering all the upcoming events the Raiden team is participating in, there’ll be a lot of opportunity for more detailed explanations of the key concepts and features of the Ithaca milestone.

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Development progress

Five weeks after the Red Eyes bug bounty started there are still 0 bug bounty issues reported in the Red Eyes release currently available on the mainnet. This means that development can fully focus on the next release on the path towards Ithaca.

The PFS and MS repositories were united in the single repository called Raiden services. This change makes a lot of sense as maintaining code for shared logic between the services will be much easier this way.

One of the features to be included in the upcoming release will be the updated WebUI. The most significant feature of the updated WebUI will be an address book which will bring support to add human friendly names to addresses.

Most of the big pull requests from the backlog in the Raiden client repository have been reviewed and merged. Working with very big pull requests that introduce big changes is not optimal as reviewing them is harder and there’s a higher chance of introducing a bug.

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Conclusion

To conclude Weekly Update 52, this week we covered the update and goals moving towards Ithaca and also recent changes of the Pathfinding Services and Monitoring Services repositories on Github. Thanks to everyone supporting this update and those contributing, see you again next week. As always please leave a comment about this update if you want something elaborated on or the Raiden project in general.

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Cheers!