Hey everyone!

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Welcome to Weekly Update 71. This will be a dual-Weekly Update, the stars didn’t align last week so we’ve combined it into a larger update for double the fun. To begin with, Raiden participated in ‘The State-of-the-Art in Scaling Solutions’ panel at CogX, the workonblockchain.com developer workshop and, more recently, a developer research call focused on routing in state channels. This update will cover these events and some of the additions to developer onboarding experience, as well as the usual development progress. Strap yourself in!

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Raiden developer portal update

The Raiden Developer Portal was initially introduced a couple of months ago in preparation for the ETHCapeTown hackathon. It provides all the resources a developer needs to start building a dApp on top of Raiden.

After collecting valuable feedback from the community, the team released the next iteration of the Raiden Developer Portal. The updated version provides links to the documentation, more example projects, API examples, download section, and more, all in one place. As the project progresses and Raiden’s ecosystem grows, additional resources and useful links will be added along the way.

Although the main target audience of the developer portal is developers, it’s a great learning resource to anyone with basic technical knowledge interested in Raiden tech. If you have a suggestion on how to improve the dev portal, feel free to share your ideas on the official subreddit or via twitter.

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Layer 2 Community Call #1: Routing in state channel networks

Last week members of the Raiden team participated at the first iteration of the Layer 2 Community Call. The call was organized by the GEO Protocol team and the plan is to continue this practice once a month. The general topic for the second call has already been agreed to and it will be channel monitoring in state channel networks.

Participants of the first call were a great mix of both developers and researchers working in the L2 field. Dominik Schmid (Raiden), Karl Bartel (Raiden) and Dima Chizhevsky (GEO Protocol) brought developer perspective to the discussion while Patrick McCorry (King’s College London), Pedro Moreno-Sanchez (TU Wien) and Stefanie Roos (Delft University of Technology) shared viewpoints from the researcher’s perspective.

The primary topic of discussion for the community call was routing in state channel networks. Some of the topics discussed during the call were: current approaches to routing algorithms, source routing and alternative techniques, channel imbalances and privacy trade-offs.

Dominik and Karl, in addition to participating in the discussion, shared: Raiden’s perspective on speedymurmurs, progress of implementing the permissive source routing, how Raiden plans to tackle the balancing problem with flexible mediation fees and more.

The call itself was very technical and requires at least some prior knowledge about the topic. The video of the call can be found here and if you feel you have trouble following the discussion, the official Raiden documentation provides much more context on Pathfinding or also the onboarding to Raiden routing for the current routing (with visuals!).

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Development progress

Over the last two weeks, significant progress was made towards increasing the automated test coverage of all modules within the Raiden client repository. Parallel to working on the test infrastructure, the dev team worked on documenting important sections of the codebase, new features and minor refactoring.

An updated version of the smart contracts brings gas optimizations as well as simpler handling of locked transfers inside the Raiden client. The channel withdraw functionality, which will enable users to withdraw funds from the channel without closing it, has been finished. The permissive source routing feature which optimizes routing as less capital is locked than in Per-Hop approach and is precondition for onion routing is under review and it should be completed in the near future.

Support for the ENS (Ethereum Name Service) has been implemented in the WebUI and we can expect this feature to be available to the users in the next release of the WebUI.

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Conclusion

To finish up Weekly Update 71, this week has mostly been about the contracts, dev portal and steps towards fee message handling for services. On the Raiden twitter a fun fact about Gnosis Safe pointed out, where you can pay fees with a number of ERC20 tokens (RDN included). Here’s Raiden being presented by Jacob at Cognition X, then again Work on Blockchain later on. The next major set of meetups the Raiden team has publicly mentioned they’re a part of is the Berlin Blockchain Week in August. As always, thanks for reading! If you have any questions about the update or Raiden project leave a comment and we’ll get back to you the best we can.

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Cheers!