Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 129. This week we’re excited to cover the Raiden submission to The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off. Of course we will also go into the usually GitHub progress, just that we will focus on the most interesting topic first. Let’s dig in!

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The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off Submission

One Month ago, Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation announced The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off. The goal of this competition is to demonstrate how your scaling solution can be used to bring Community Points to the Ethereum mainnet. The deadline for submitting a demo was July 31st.

The Raiden team took notice of the bake-off right away. After they analyzed the requirements and internally discussed how Raiden can be integrated into the solution, they released a Reddit post announcing the participation. Since then, the Raiden development team was fully focused on implementing new features and preparing a demo for the bake-off.

Just this last Friday the Raiden team submitted their demo for the bake-off. As it was stated in the post announcing the participation, Raiden is not a perfect fit for Reddit's use case. However, the Raiden development team pulled some neat tricks out of their sleeves to move most actions off-chain and therefore make them faster and cheaper. Minting and distribution of tokens is moved off-chain with a new concept called claims, transfers are inherently fast in the Raiden network while burning tokens is also moved off-chain. The complete documentation on Raiddit can be found here and video demonstration is available here.

The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off made quite a splash in the Ethereum L2 space and there are 20 submissions in total. It will take Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation some time to evaluate all the submissions and decide on the winner. We will be following it closely and share any updates with you as soon as they are available!

Development progress

During the past week, the Raiden development team continued working on the demo for The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off and the Raiden light client.

The demo was successfully completed and submitted before the deadline. The corresponding code for the Raiddit PoC can be found on the “raiddit” branches inside the repositories (eg. link to Raiden client "raiddit" branch).

The Raiden light client repository was also very active. Currently, the devs are testing it with the help of the scenario player and fixing any issues they find in the process.

Conclusion

We’re very excited for the timing of The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off because of how it lined up with Raiden Network’s latest major release. It’s quite clear that the Raiden team has been working their heart out on both brainstorming how this could work realistically for users and pushing on implementing that. It was also very fun to see other Layer 2 project’s submissions in the contest. Anyway, if you want to learn more about this update or Raiden Network overall then please leave a comment and we will get back to you the best we can.

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Cheers!