Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 125. For this week we’re super excited to dive into the announcement of the Reddit scaling “Bake-off”. Without further adieu, let’s dive in!

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“Reddit Scaling Bake-Off” competition

A couple of weeks ago Reddit, in conjunction with the Ethereum foundation, invited Ethereum scaling experts to show how their solutions can be used to bring the Community Points to the Ethereum mainnet.

A detailed explanation of what they are looking to achieve can be found in the corresponding Ethereum post. The requirements listed in the blogpost describe an ideal solution which is capable of processing quite a large number of transactions without any drawbacks in security, decentralization or cost. Currently, such an ideal solution does not exist and many projects from the Ethereum L2 space took up the challenge to make a demo showcasing their project.

The Raiden team took notice of the bake-off right away and started planning their approach to the problem. Last week they released a reddit post going into detail on their thoughts so far. According to their findings, a payment channel network is suited for Reddit’s use case in a decentralized manner. However, to better satisfy Reddit’s needs, the Raiden team is working on several smaller features in a separate repository.

There are still 3 full weeks left for the Reddit scaling competition until the deadline on July 31st. This gives the Raiden team enough time to work on a demo and showcase what Raiden can do to scale the Reddit community points.

Development progress

As stated in the reddit post, the Raiden development team is focused on preparing the demo for the “Reddit Scaling Bake-Off”.

The most challenging part is to find a way to on-board the requested amount of users during the short period of time (which would normally require on-chain channel openings). However, the Raiden team has some ideas and are working on the implementation. Currently, the repository they are working in is not publicly available so we will have to wait to see what they come up with.

In parallel, further progress has been made toward releasing the Alderaan version of the Raiden Light Client. One of the last features waiting for completion is the channel withdraw functionality which is ready for testing and merging.

Conclusion

To wrap up this Weekly Update we’re very excited about the team joining the Reddit competition regardless of the outcome. Let’s see how the space progresses and we hope that you will leave any question in the comment section. See you next week.

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Cheers!