Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 122. For this week we’ll be covering Raiden attending and presenting at CogX (similar to this time last year) as well as the upcoming Gitcoin hackathon and our usual GitHub development progress. Let’s dive in!

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Raiden @ CogX 2020

The fourth edition of CogX took place from June 8th to June 10th 2020. This year's event was completely virtual and it brought together over 30,000 participants including more than 600 speakers.

One of the speakers was developer Dominik who’s been working on Raiden since the start of 2018. During his presentation, he focused on the benefits of using Raiden for the ERC-20 payments and the basic concepts of the Raiden protocol.

The video of the presentation is available here. It is a great 15-minute introduction to the Raiden protocol and we encourage everyone researching the Raiden project to check it out as it answers a lot of frequently asked questions. Of course, if you have any additional questions feel free to leave a comment!

Gitcoin “Protect Privacy” Virtual Hackathon

Gitcoin aims to grow open source projects by properly incentivizing developers to work on such projects. They offer and organize many products such as grants, bounties and virtual hackathons.

The upcoming hackathon organized by Gitcoin will focus on privacy and privacy protection. The Raiden team is interested in this topic and thus decided to join the hackathon by offering 2 bounties. The first bounty will look for the best hack which uses Raiden to provide private payments while in the second bounty the Raiden team is looking for the hack which integrates existing tools to increase the privacy of on-chain transactions in Raiden. The hackathon starts on June 15th and hackers will have 2 weeks to work on their submissions.

In order to help hackers get started with Raiden, the Raiden development team will host a workshop on June 16th (2PM EST / 8PM CEST) during which they will also brainstorm any ideas attendees will come up with.

Privacy protection is a very important feature in any modern software, especially when it comes to payments. It will be interesting to see the different approaches which hackers will take to improve the privacy aspect of Raiden as well as to see some of the first dApps built using Alderaan release.

Development progress

Last week the Raiden development team was primarily focused on preparing the codebase for the development progress towards the upcoming milestone goals. This included: updating the dependencies, fixing a couple of easy bugs, making sure the testing infrastructure is stable, and planning future features.

Speaking of future features, the development team agreed on the specifications for the WebRTC support in the Raiden client. WebRTC will allow for even faster payments as it is much faster than the currently used Matrix transport. It is already supported in the light client and the development team is very pleased with its performance.

Other priorities for the upcoming week include tackling the technical debt and fixing 4 known bugs (none of which are critical).

Conclusion

To finish up this Weekly Update, there’s been quite a bit of activity revolving around CogX and also wrapping up more nice touches to Alderaan. As someone in the community keenly pointed out, there was the new WebUI (v1.0.0) release this week which brings a new sleek design along with better UX and more features available within the user interface. See the release notes for more details on that. That’s all we have for you for this update. If you have any questions about the weekly events and development or just Raiden Network overall then don’t hesitate to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

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Cheers!