Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 104. It’s great to see the team’s dedicated development resulted in the project being listed again as one of the top 10 ERC-20 projects with the highest recorded developer activity on Santiment for January. Let’s dig into the development progress of last week and other fun facts about Raiden!

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Raiden testing infrastructure

Raiden’s testing infrastructure consists of the test suite and two testing tools which have been internally developed by the Raiden’s development team. There are more than 800 test variants within the test suite, from unit and smoke tests to more complex integration and stress tests. Custom-built tools used in testing include the Raiden Scenario Player and Raiden Echo node.

The Scenario Player allows developers to define a scenario which is then simulated using real nodes in the environment of choice (either the Ethereum main chain, one of the testnets or a private chain). To give some examples, tasks that can be defined in a scenario include: join a token network, create a channel, top up a channel, etc. An example of such a scenario can be seen here.

The Raiden Echo node enables users who want to try out Raiden to send transfers to a node operated by a bot with a fixed set of automatic responses. Corresponding documentation describing automatic responses can be found here. Last week echo node was moved from the Raiden client to the separate repository. This decision makes sense as the echo node is not a client related feature. Decoupling unrelated features makes code cleaner and easier to maintain.

Development progress

Developers working on the Raiden client were focused on identifying and fixing the remaining open issues inside the Alderaan milestone goal. In the upcoming week, they plan to continue working on optimizing parts of the codebase to enhance performance.

A new release of the Raiden light client has been introduced. The changelog can be found here. Changes include optimizations for event polling, which will help run the light client on low-end devices, such as a NanoPi. Also included in this version are: improved PFS url matching, updated Raiden Contracts to v0.36.0 and derived subkey support. If you are interested to try it out yourself you can via this link and following the Try Out the Raiden Demo dApp guide.

Conclusion

Wrapping up this Weekly Update, the development team focused on adjusting for new settlement timeouts, improved error catching, testing enhancements and fine-tuning. The development of the Light Client has seen a promising number of improvements, improving its utility and UX with the new version. That’s everything we have for you this week, another reminder for anyone in the area, the next event coming up where the Raiden team is attending and hosting a workshop (!) will be EthCC. If you have any questions about this update or Raiden Network in general then please leave a comment and we’ll get back to you the best we can.

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Cheers!