Two weeks ago, EF Reddit announced a “Reddit Scaling Bake-Off”, which we think is a great way to evaluate possible L2 systems for this specific use case.

The Raiden team has been busy planning/evaluating what’s needed to fulfill these requirements. In general, we think payment channel networks are well suited for this use case, due to the high theoretical throughput and the requirement that the solution needs to be decentralized. However, Raiden might not address all the requirements out of the box. Because of this, we will be making some small adjustments to Raiden here and there in order to be able to better solve the challenge. These changes will happen in a separate repository and will not affect the current Raiden code base. If we end up discovering some clever solutions or new features while working on the Reddit challenge we might bring these back to Raiden itself. We see this very much as a learning experience and a good chance for us as a team to get a deeper understanding of how our technology fits into the ecosystem.

Looking at the specific requirements of the challenge, the amount of transfers required should be easily doable. Another challenge is the amount of new users to on-board during that short period of time (which would normally require on-chain channel openings). But we’re optimistic that we have come up with a solution for this problem! At the moment the biggest challenge for using Raiden is that users change their status between online and offline frequently and this can make transfers unreliable.

We are looking forward to sharing our learning experience and results with you all!