As some of the attentive Raiden followers have noticed, summer of 2018 is coming to an end. This is relevant, since we were aiming to have an alpha testing version (Red Eyes milestone) released on the Ethereum mainnet by the end of summer. We know that many are excited to see Raiden being deployed on the mainnet soon, hence we would like to share the current development status and the reasons why the software is not quite ready for mainnet deployment yet.

Before we dive in, we would like to stress one point: We want to build software that works. We want the software to be secure to use and helpful for the Ethereum ecosystem and we don’t want to sacrifice the quality of the product for a hasty move.

What did we work on since the “Developer Preview” release?

Since the release of Raiden v0.1.0 (“Developer Preview”) one year ago, the team has spent most of its resources on the following additions and enhancements:

Continuous improvement of the protocol, usability and new features

Ensuring recoverability of the Raiden client

Internal audit of the smart contracts

Changing Raiden transport protocol from UDP to Matrix

Improving Client-API and documentation

Creating the Raiden Explorer, an overview and visualization page of network statistics

Intensive automated and manual testing

Enhancing the stability of the system

What still needs to be done before the launch of Red Eyes on the Ethereum mainnet?

Some tasks still need to be finalized prior to a release on mainnet. Amongst others these are:

Testing and bug fixing

Improving the security of the Matrix transport

Finalizing the Raiden Explorer

As you are probably aware, we are releasing Red Eyes on mainnet with the primary goal of testing and obtaining user feedback under live conditions. We plan to include safety features for the users. Detailed information about these features will be made public prior to the release.

What else are we working on to support the release?

In addition to the ongoing development efforts, we are preparing a bug bounty, which should start once Raiden Red Eyes is deployed on the mainnet. You will be able to find information about the bug bounty at bounty.raiden.network soon.

What is already working?

If you have been following our weekly releases and GitHub summary updates on Reddit, you will have noticed that the development team is working full steam.

Feel free to try these working features in the latest version on the Ropsten testnet:

Opening, closing and settling of payment channels

Topping up channels

Single and multi-hop transfers

Automatically joining a token network and connecting to peers

REST API with endpoints for all functionalities

Restartability in case of a proper shutdown of the Raiden node

Redesigned WebUI

By when do we expect to have the alpha testing release (Red Eyes) version on the mainnet?

Our plan going forward is to freeze a release after all known bugs are fixed and all needed features are implemented. We will test this release for another 2 weeks. If no critical bugs are discovered, we consider the release sufficiently mature for releasing on mainnet.

We will keep you updated and hope you understand our decision to prioritize quality and stability of the product over speed.

Until then, please have a look at our weekly to bi-weekly testnet releases and try out the Raiden Network on the Ropsten testnet!

The Raiden Team