Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 64. This week we’ll be covering Raiden at the ETHCapeTown hackathon, looking at the contributors/hackers utilizing the Raiden API and some general coverage. Of course, the summary of usual Github progress on top of that. Let’s dive in!

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Raiden in Cape Town

Last week, the Raiden team participated at two events in Cape Town. Thursday was reserved for DeFiCapeTown while Friday and the weekend the team was part of the ETHCapeTown Hackathon.

The primary focus of Raiden’s DeFiCapeTown participation was networking with other projects in the decentralized finance ecosystem. The agenda of the event started with two hours reserved for networking followed by a short opening presentation by co-founder and managing director of Linum Labs, Devon Krantz. Next on the schedule were the two keynote presentations (MakerDAO and Centrifuge) and a panel discussion titled “Financial Inclusion - Frontier Tech in Africa”.

As we already mentioned in previous weekly updates, Raiden was one of the sponsors of the ETHCapeTown hackathon. On top of sponsoring the event, the Raiden team decided to reward the hackathon team participants with the most innovative use case built using the Raiden API or the best Raiden enhancement hack with $2000 in RDN tokens. The team collected list of potential ideas for the hackathon in the recent Medium article, while all resources needed for hackers at the event to get started building on Raiden tech were found on the new Raiden Developer Portal and ETHCapeTown Hackathon Raiden Network guide.

On the first day of the event Franziska and Jacob showcased running a Raiden node on Goerli testnet both offstage and onstage in a presentation titled “Get started #buidling on Raiden”. They managed to spark a lot of interest and several talented teams decided to pick up Raiden as a core technology for their hackathon projects.

At the hack location, 7 or 8 teams were seen hacking on Raiden along with some other teams showing interest. Notable projects that came out of those (in no particular order):

• Faïrspöt (submission, presentation and Github) - enables paying for WiFi internet access on the go (in 100kb chunks) using Raiden
• NИtube.network (submission, presentation, demo and Github) - enables incentivized, decentralized P2P live streaming with micropayments using Raiden
• DTok (submission, presentation and Github) - DTok team built a decentralized streaming and tipping platform with Raiden, BurnerWallet integration and ens domains
• Team SCG (submission, presentation and Github) - buying and supplying electricity on an open marketplace using Raiden for payments.

The winner of the Raiden API reward went to NИtube.network with their live streaming implementation of micropayments utilizing Raiden Network. It was great to see the other ideas of Raiden implementation that came out of the hackathon from other teams!

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Development progress

Last week, the development team was dedicated to fixing bugs discovered during internal testing, improving codebase and planning future development.

Significant focus was given to integrating mypy static type checker to the Raiden client code base, as well as minor refactoring of some parts of the codebase development team decided could be improved (such as tests and continuous integration workflow). Integration of the mypy tool to the codebase will make identifying bugs easier and accidental introduction of new ones in the development process less likely.

As for the short-term plans for future development, the team agreed on the list of priorities. Increasing test coverage of some modules which are lacking in this aspect and complete integration of mypy will be some of the highest priorities in the upcoming weeks.

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Conclusion

Concluding Weekly Update 64, the team was hard at work even over the holiday season. ETHCapeTown and the work put into the events leading up over the week was an exciting success, not just for Raiden but also the wider Ethereum community with spreading awareness for the potential of decentralized technology. The next ETHGlobal event is ETHNewYork so if you’re in the area be sure to check that out. As always, thanks for the support and reading the Weekly Update, feel free to leave a comment on anything related to this update or Raiden Network in general and we’ll get back to you the best we can.

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Cheers!