Hey everyone!

Welcome to weekly update 174. This week we are very excited to announce that the Raiden Bespin release is now available on the Ethereum mainnet! We’ll go over the announcement, new features introduced by the Bespin release and what we can expect in the near term future. Let’s dig in!

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Raiden v2.0.0 - “Bespin”

After months of dedicated development, last week the Raiden development team introduced the Raiden Bespin release on the Ethereum mainnet.

The official blogpost provides all the important details about the release. First thing to take notice of is that channels opened with the older versions need to be closed, settled and re-opened. However the Bespin release is still using the Alderaan smart contracts so restrictions on deploying new token networks (DAI and WETH are available) and channel deposit limits still apply.

When it comes to features the most important ones are improvements in the transport layer and faster sync times. Transport layer was unreliable in the previous releases and the Bespin release should ensure these issues aren’t present any more. Other features include endpoint for UDC deposits/withdrawals, “quick connect” functionality, compatibility with latest clients and much more (full list available in the blogpost).

Furthermore, Bespin also enables a successful launch of the first mainnet version of the Raiden light client. The light client team reached full parity with the Bespin release a few weeks back and they are currently in the testing phase. If everything goes according to the plan we can expect to see the light client on the Ethereum mainnet in the near future.

We invite everyone to try out the Bespin release and provide their feedback. The easiest way to get you started is with the help of the Raiden Wizard tool but you can also download it directly from the release page.

Conclusion

This is all for this week. Now that Bespin is out we are eager to see the Raiden light client available on the Ethereum mainnet. The Raiden light client won’t require users to run a Raiden node while it will provide all the security and features of the full Raiden client. Thank you for all the support you provide every week and congratulations to the Raiden team for a successful major release.

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Cheers!

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Developer portal: https://developer.raiden.network/

GitHub: https://github.com/raiden-network