Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 105. As the heads-down development February continues, that’s what we’ll be focusing on for this week’s update. The team worked across several repositories in parallel and we also have a bit of wider community development to cover. Let’s get into it!

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Development progress

During the previous week, the development team continued working towards the Ithaca development milestone. We’ve been following their efforts in solving bugs and optimizing the performance of the Raiden client for the last several months and it seems their efforts are coming together nicely.

A good example of this is the removal of the exemption of the initial Matrix sync for a timeout. The Raiden client previously had trouble getting in sync with the Matrix transport layer in a reasonable time. The initial sync was extra slow due to the fact that during it more data had to be handled than during the following syncs when the client was already running. This is why the development team decided to exempt the initial sync from the timeout limit and allow it to take additional time. By implementing several optimizations, the development team was able to significantly improve the performance of the sync process to the point where initial sync did not require extra time. Thus it was safe to simply handle initial sync as any other. The great news is that further optimizations are already being worked on.

In parallel to working on bug fixes and optimizations, the development team took the time to fix the publishing of the nightly builds of the Raiden client. Nightly builds are created every day and include the latest code from the development branch. They can be found here. Please remember that nightly builds may contain unintentionally introduced bugs and for that reason should not be used in a production environment.

Furthermore, some new improvements were introduced to the WebUI last week. They include; a complete redesign in addition to bug fixes, view of the transfer history and better dialogues.

In the light client repository, developers worked on minor design improvements of the dApp and correct handling of the chain reorganizations, matching it more closely with the Raiden client.

Community

This week we had a new project pop-up announcing they’re working on Raiden Network integration (announcement). Stakenet is a DEX building off-chain swaps and taking a similar approach as XUD in areas such as the swap-resolver. If you’re interested to learn more about Stakenet, you can find their GitHub here or join their community.

Conclusion

To wrap up, as mentioned in the first Weekly Update of February, we expect the trend of heads-down development and testing to continue throughout the month. With only 2 weeks to go, EthCC is getting closer and we’re looking forward to hearing more about Raiden developers Kelsos and Jacob who’ll be representing Raiden Network. As with all Raiden-attended events, we’ll try to get the inside scoop (so to speak) on livestreams and videos and share it with you guys here and in community channels. If you have any questions about this update please fire away in the comments and we’ll get back to you the best we can.

Cheers!