Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 84. For today's update we’ll be digging into the upcoming mainnet release, Alderaan, in more detail. We'll also go over some of the usual GitHub coverage. Let’s dive in!

​

Features of the upcoming Alderaan release

As the development team focuses on reaching the Alderaan development milestone, we will provide a short overview of the most important features which will be included in the Alderaan release. Alderaan is confirmed to be a mainnet release which means all features in the release will be available on the Ethereum mainnet.

The most notable Raiden protocol change will be the introduction of the Raiden services. Monitoring services will allow users to go offline safely by watching open payment channels in replacement of the user going offline. While pathfinding services will help users in finding short or cheap routes through the network and potentially assisting in balancing the network overall.

Furthermore, the Alderaan release will introduce mediation fees. Mediation fees will enable users to earn fees by mediating payments through their open channels. Nodes will be able to decide whether they want to mediate payments or not and if they want to earn mediation fees. More details on mediation fees can be found in the corresponding tech deep dive.

Other important features include channel withdraw functionality which enables withdrawing parts or all funds from open channels without the need of closing them, a more stable and bug-free Raiden client (referring to non-critical bugs), an updated WebUI exposing more relevant information, new functionalities including things that have been covered briefly in previous Weekly Updates, and more.

If you are interested to try features listed today, you can as they are all available on the testnets.

​

Development progress

The Alderaan milestone related issues are currently the highest priority issues for the development team. Some of the tasks which the development team worked on during the past week include uniforming and better defining fee calculation across repositories, the introduction of defaults for different fee components, improvements in precondition checking and better error handling, documentation and more.

In the upcoming week, we can expect the team to continue working on the remaining open issues contained in the Alderaan milestone, in parallel to exhaustive internal testing of the completed features.

​

Conclusion

To wrap up, in this Weekly Update we focused on Alderaan as the upcoming mainnet release. The development team looks to be in full gear to get everything ready in preparation to get it out. Lastly, Raiden was represented at the small meetup in Zagreb (Croatia) last week, where I gave a short introduction to payment channel networks and Raiden’s development progress. As always, thanks for reading and please leave a comment if there’s something you’re curious about the update or Raiden Network in general. See you next week.

​

Cheers!