The Raiden Network has announced the launch of its final testnet designed to provide scaling and offchain payment solutions for the Ethereum blockchain.

Sometimes compared to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, Raiden will be deploying on the Ropsten testnet under the code name Icalo and this will be the last step before the promised summer mainnet release.

According to Raiden’s blog post, Icalo will serve to overcome some minor issues before the mainnet, referred to as Red Eyes, will be deployed. A bug bounty will also be in operation during the Red Eyes rollout.

NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS

Raiden raised over 109,000 ETH in a crowdsale in November 2017 – at a price of 0.0021906 ETH/RDN – but marketing has appeared low on their agenda as news from the project has been sparse in the intervening months.

A minimum viable product (MVP) was expected soon after the token generation event but that was shelved in favour of a developer preview version as the team did not feel the time was right to refer to their product as ‘viable’ until further tests were carried out.

Staying away from the hype appears to have benefited Raiden as they are on target to bring their product to market as per their initial roadmap.

Red Eyes will be classified as a state channel which means the transactions taking place on it are away from the main Ethereum blockchain. There are numerous possible use cases but the one most discussed is for regular micro payments.

In this scenario, users would transact on the state channel and only when the series of transactions were complete would the parties finally exit Red Eyes. At this stage, just the final balances, not the individual transactions, are then recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.