Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 98. For the last update of 2019, we’re going to include a recap of the Raiden team’s community-related activities throughout the year as well as going over GitHub development progress looking back. Let’s dig in!

Hackathons, events and meetups

The Raiden team participated in numerous blockchain events throughout the year. They supported their local crypto communities by attending local events and promoted Raiden technology at events organized all over the world. We will provide a short overview only of the biggest and most interesting events as the complete list is too long to fit in one update.

The first prominent event of the year for the Raiden team was EthCC Paris in early March. On top of having a booth where visitors could try Raiden and ask questions, Paul and Franzi gave a presentation on stage and Franzi participated at the DeFi meetup Paris. In April the Raiden Network sponsored the ETHCapeTown hackathon and supported teams hacking with Raiden on-site. Some of the projects developed during the event include NИtube, FaïrSpöt and dTok.

During the summer, Raiden supported a couple of online hackathons organized by Gitcoin (GROW ETHEREUM BEYOND BLOCKCHAIN) and participated in DappCon 2018 and the ETHBerlinZwei hackathon.

The last and most important event of the year was Devcon 5. During the team's visit to Japan, Augusto and Franzi joined the State Channels summit, Lefteris joined a panel at the Layer 2 Osaka edition and Raiden co-organized the “Demo time at the mystery box event” in Osaka.

Development progress

Red Eyes, the first Raiden client mainnet release, was introduced in December 2018. It included a secure and functional Raiden protocol, however it did not include some nice to have features (such as channel withdraw) and auxiliary services which are crucial for Raiden to be production-ready. The Alderaan development milestone goal which should offer these features on the Ethereum mainnet is currently yet to be reached, although the team is pushing full steam ahead. Apropos of Alderaan, the latest release of the Raiden client (Narcoleptic Neo) is the 2nd release candidate for the Alderaan release. The Raiden development team dedicated a significant amount of the final months of 2019 polishing and fixing remaining known issues in the Raiden client.

Some of the client features which the Raiden development team worked on during 2019 include: withdraw function, mediation fees framework, integration with monitoring and pathfinding services, general stability and reliability improvements, robust testing infrastructure and more.

In parallel to working on the client, the development team also worked on the Raiden services, Raiden light client, smart contracts, WebUI and the Raiden Wizard installer.

Development of the Raiden light client began early in the year. Currently, it supports almost all the features Raiden client does and you can try them on testnets here (don’t forget to check out the Try Out The Raiden Demo dApp guide).

Development of the Raiden services was at a very early phase at the start of the year. Currently, they are completely integrated in the Raiden client and are mostly ready for the Alderaan release.

Smart contract functionalities were expanded since the Red Eyes release to support Alderaan features.

Conclusion

To wrap up the last Weekly Update of the year, this has been a short summary of 2019 and if you’d like more details on anything that you’d like us to dig deeper into then don’t hesitate to ask and we’ll get back to you the best we can! We hope you all have a happy New Year, thanks for reading and see you next year.

Cheers!