Hey everyone!

Welcome to weekly update 144. This week we’ll check the new releases introduced last week and we will also make a brief overview of the latest hackathon the Raiden team decided to participate in. Let’s dig in!

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Raiden client 1.2.0 - “Alderaan - Tristan da Cunha”

After a couple of months of dedicated development a new release of the Raiden Client has been launched under the codename Alderaan - Tristan da Cunha. This release introduces important upgrades to the Matrix transport layer which should improve stability and reliability of the Raiden client.

Matrix toDevice message support and compatibility with synapse 1.19 are the newly introduced features in the Raiden client’s transport layer, while capabilities will simplify handling of the backwards compatibility. Capabilities are a way to communicate to other Raiden nodes what functionalities are supported by the client. This way Raiden nodes will be able to find out which version of the client is run on the other nodes and adjust their behaviour accordingly.

The new release is available for download on the release page and if you need any help getting started you can reach the Raiden dev team in the developer chat or just leave a comment and we will give our best to help you out.

Encode Hack Club hackathon

ETHGlobal hackathon ended and the winners were announced (you can read all about it in the weekly update 143). The next event on the list is the Encode Hack Club hackathon - the world’s biggest university blockchain hackathon for students, researchers and hackers.

The Raiden team prepared 2 challenges:

1. Create a hack/project that utilizes Raiden to do scalable and fast ERC20 transfers.
2. Create a hack that “activates” Raiden deposits through DeFi platforms to generate yield or interests while the funds are locked in the protocol.

Great news for all the teams considering hacking on Raiden is that the first challenge will pay out $200 in RDN for every quality submission. The second challenge has a bounty of $2000 in RDN for the best submission. Additionally, as a part of the hackathon, the Raiden team will make a brief introduction to Raiden on the 18th of the November and will also do the full technical workshop on the 25th.

If you are interested in joining you can do so before December 14th via this link.

Development progress

In addition to releasing the 1.2.0 version of the Raiden client, the Raiden development team also worked on other tasks. The Github issue for the 1.3.0 release has already been created and planning has started.

The Raiden light client also made a new release last week. Testnet Release - v0.13.0 - Papagaio introduces upgrades to a lot of dependencies used in the project as well as new bug fixes and features for the end user. Overall, the light client should be more stable and the dApp shouldn’t break unexpectedly. You can easily try out the Raiden light client yourself by visiting https://lightclient.raiden.network

Conclusion

That’s all for this week. A couple of releases were introduced and the Raiden team decided to continue their support of hackathons. We encourage everyone currently running the Raiden node to upgrade their node to the latest version and as always if you have any questions, just leave a comment.

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Cheers!