Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 120. For this update we’re excited to cover one of the largest milestones in the history of Raiden Network up until this point. We’ll be focusing on Alderaan and address a couple of frequently asked questions by the community. Let’s dig in!

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Raiden Alderaan mainnet release

Last week the Raiden development team—after months of dedicated development—reached the Alderaan milestone goal and proudly introduced the Alderaan release. The Alderaan release is the first major release of the Raiden Network on the Ethereum mainnet since the Red Eyes release from December 2018. It expands the Raiden protocol with a significant number of new features on top of making it more robust and faster.

The major features introduced by the Alderaan release include: auxiliary services (pathfinding and monitoring), mediation fees and partial withdrawal. For a detailed explanation of each of the new features as well as other useful information such as a guide for starting your own Raiden node check out the official blog post.

When starting your Raiden node, make sure to read “Important security notes for usage” and “Known issues” sections in the official blogs post to avoid increasing the risk of any unwanted behaviour of the Raiden node.

RDN utility in the Alderaan release

The Alderaan release introduced utility for the RDN token in the Raiden protocol on the Ethereum mainnet. Network users can use RDN to pay fees for monitoring and pathfinding services while service providers are required to deposit RDN in the service registry contract in order to be able to provide these services to the users. A complete explanation of how exactly pathfinding and monitoring services help users in the Raiden protocol and how they work can be found here.

Every service provider can set their own fee for providing users with pathfinding service. The default behaviour of the Raiden client is to check all available service providers during startup and to choose the cheapest one. The default maximum on the Raiden client side for the pathfinding service fee is 0.05 RDN in the Alderaan release.

Monitoring of channels is disabled by default on the Raiden client side in the Alderaan release. If enabled, the Raiden client will offer 5 RDN fee for monitoring channels.

As already mentioned, service providers are required to deposit RDN in order to be able to provide users with monitoring and pathfinding services. The amount of RDN required to be staked is constantly changing. Whenever a new service provider registers, the required amount is increased by 25% while if no new service providers are registered the amount will decay by 3% every day. The current amount is kept in the Service Registry smart contract in the currentPrice property. At the time of writing the currentPrice was 11406 RDN.

What’s next now that the Alderaan release is here?

The Alderaan development milestone goal and the Alderaan release were in the making ever since Alderaan was first announced mid 2019. The main goal of the Alderaan release is to be the first full suite version of Raiden protocol on the Ethereum mainnet and to lay the foundation for the future upgrades and eventual full release without any safety restrictions.

The Short term goal of the Raiden development team is to “catch a breath” and to close a couple of loose ends of the Alderaan release (such as the release of the new and improved WebUI). Afterwards we can expect them to continue with the same focus towards the next milestone goals, most probably Bespin first.

Conclusion

To finish up this update, we’re excited that Alderaan has finally made it to the mainnet and urge anyone who’s been watching the project to join the network. If you want to see nodes to connect to, feel free to check out the Raiden Explorer. If you have more questions you can always join the Gitter or if you’re more of a Telegram person, stop by the Raiden Network Community (RNC) chat. Or leave a comment under this post and we’ll get back to you the best we can.

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Cheers!