Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 91. For this week’s update, we’ll be covering the Devcon V State Channel Summit presentation that’s recently been made available online for everyone that wasn’t able to make it to Japan this year. We’ll also be going over our usual coverage of the Raiden Network GitHub progress. Let’s dive in!

State Channels Summit at Devcon 5

Devcon, the largest annual gathering in the Ethereum ecosystem, was this year held in Japan at the beginning of October. Raiden team participated at several events during their visit to Japan (the full report can be found in weekly update 87), one of which was the State Channel Summit. The summit was part of the first day at Devcon and organized by L4. It featured Connext, Perun, Celer, Funfair, Magmo, Counterfactual, and Raiden.

Unfortunately, a livestream wasn’t available during the event, however, most of the talks were recorded and the organizer is slowly uploading videos since the event finished. Last week’s video from State Channel Summit was uploaded.

As we already knew, Raiden was represented by Franzi and Augusto. During her part of the presentation, Franziska pointed out that Raiden team recognizes they are dealing with two different types of users. The first type is end-users who want to use Raiden as a stand-alone product while the second type is the projects looking at integrating Raiden. Both types are dealing with different challenges and Franzi explained how Raiden team is working on overcoming those challenges.

Augusto during his section focused on trade-offs in Raiden’s system design. Several trade-offs he discussed and elaborated Raiden’s team approach to were trustlessness vs speed, performance vs privacy and ease of use vs adjustability. He explained how the Raiden team doesn’t plan to enforce any of these decisions and each user will have the opportunity to decide what they value more.

The video can be found here (link includes the relevant timestamp for the Raiden Network section) and we encourage everyone to check it out as it discusses and explains a lot of features that will be part of the upcoming Alderaan release.

Development progress

The development team continued working towards the Alderaan milestone during the last week. Most of the focus was dedicated towards testing and bug fixing while in parallel few smaller features were completed as well.

Most of the testing and bug fixing was related to Matrix transport inside the Raiden client. The most significant small feature implemented during the last week is the full support of Infura. This means that everyone interested in trying out Raiden will have the option to use Infura for layer 1 (Ethereum node). However, it is always recommended to run your own Ethereum node, this supports the wider network and gives you street cred.

Conclusion

This week in the Raiden Network community, we’ve gone back to cover the Raiden Network at Devcon V. The development of Raiden pushes on with feature improvements such as full support of Infura and transport fixes leading up to the next mainnet release. As always, thanks for reading and if you have any questions regarding this update or Raiden Network overall please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. See you again next week.

Cheers!