Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 61! This week, we’ll be covering events relevant to Raiden Network, such as the ETHGlobal hackathon coming up in April and meetups during the past week. We’ll also be covering Github progress on what the devs have completed and been working on. Let’s dig in!

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ETHCapeTown Hackaton

ETHGlobal is an organization dedicated to “onboarding thousands of developers into the Ethereum ecosystem” by hosting and organizing hackathons all over the world. Upcoming ETHCapeTown will be the first ETHGlobal hackathon in Africa and the Raiden team has decided to sponsor the event. This will not be the first time Raiden decided to join one of the hackathons in ETHGlobal series as it already hosted one of the prizes at ETHSingapore and participated at ETHBerlin.

ETHCapeTown will take place in Cape Town from April 19th to April 21st. During the event all attendees will have the opportunity to attend interesting talks while teams of hackers will give their best to build new tech on top of Ethereum and win one of the prizes. A team of experienced mentors will assist the hackers with any questions they might have in the process.

The great news is that registrations for hackers, volunteers and mentors are still open so if you are interested make sure to check it out!

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Development progress

Last week, the development team continued working towards the next release on the path of the Ithaca milestone. Optimizations for mobile devices were added to the WebUI (web browser user interface), which is a great tool for using Raiden on the fly without having to interact with a node via command line. Prior to these improvements it could get a bit crowded on small mobile screens using the WebUI so it’ll be interesting to try it out. In parallel to the development of the new features, a significant amount of effort is being put into internal testing and fixing bugs found in the process.

Initial integration of mediation fees, one of the core functionalities of the Raiden protocol, is almost completed. The pull request which will enable this feature is currently under review and we can expect it to be merged very soon.

Apart from successful integration of mediation fees and a couple minor features, the development team aims to resolve all known bugs before making the next release.

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Conclusion

To finish up today's Weekly Update, looking forward to see what’s up next for ETHCapeTown. Alongside that, we’ve seen some community events relevant to Raiden and payment channels, which were briefly mentioned in the last Weekly Update, such as Storj presenting at DC CryptoCurrency Mining—showcasing how fast the project could make payments across the world—and one of the Raiden devs helping and being crowned ETh/Web3 Community Townhall godfather. Anyway, as always, thanks to everyone in the community reading this update and those contributing. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you’re looking for more information.

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Cheers!