Hey everyone!

Welcome to weekly update 95. For this update we’ll be looking into the recent Ethereum hardfork and how it relates to Raiden Network and layer 2 more broadly. We’ll also be covering the usual GitHub development activity. Let’s dive in!

Ethereum Istanbul upgrade

The Raiden Network is a second layer solution running on Ethereum, as such, hardforks on Ethereum can be significant to Raiden Network. The Ethereum Istanbul hardfork introduced 6 EIPs, two of which add new opcodes (a good explanation of what that is can be found here). The first is ChainID (EIP 1344) which relates to EIP 712, for anyone who’s followed the Weekly Update series from early on might remember the dive into the details of that EIP. The second opcode is Repricing for trie-size-dependent (EIP 1884).

Another EIP significant to layer two is Transaction data gas cost reduction (EIP 2028) which has the potential to improve scalability by moving storage and computation off-chain and the gas per non-zero byte is reduced from 68 to 16 (the gas cost of zero bytes is unchanged).

There are a few more EIPs that are slightly less significant to Layer 2 and Raiden Network, you can find them here or read a technical explanation if you’re interested to learn more!

Development progress

The development team continued working towards the Alderaan milestone goal. The highest priority meta tasks last week were debugging optimizations and fixing issues related to missing capacity updates.

The Pathfinding Service relies on capacity updates to determine optimal routes inside a token network. In the scenario where it might miss some of them, it won’t be able to provide optimal routes as it won’t have the correct overview of channel capacities inside of the token network. Several bug fixes made last week should prevent this from happening in the future.

Optimizations made in debugging tools will help the development team with a faster and easier debugging process. Some of the newly developed tools are: a script for quick channel opening, a tool for easy token minting on multiple nodes and script which simulates high traffic (i.e. stress test).

Conclusion

To wrap up this Weekly Update, the Istanbul hardfork puts focus on improving Ethereum’s layer 2 ecosystem which is great to see. If you’re running a full node, don’t forget to upgrade your Geth/Parity client (there’s approximately 3% remaining who’ve yet to upgrade). That’s it for this Weekly Update, if you have any questions about the Ethereum fork, this update, or Raiden Network in general then don’t hesitate to ask. Thanks for reading and see you next week.

Cheers!