The team of Raiden, an off-chain Ethereum scaling solution, enabling fast, low-fee, and scalable token transfers, today announced the Bespin release of the Raiden Network. This Bespin release (the third major release) is the next step towards a fully-fledged Raiden Network.
“The main focus of the Bespin release is stability and especially the stability of the transport layer. The transport layer has caused the team some long debugging sessions over the last year, so we’re very pleased to finally have a stable transport layer in place. One additional thing that we’re very excited about is that the Bespin release on the mainnet will be followed by the Raiden Light Client release on the mainnet very soon. We encourage anyone interested in doing fast, cheap, and scalable payments on Ethereum to try Bespin.”
– The Raiden Network Team
What’s New
For a brief overview of the new significant updates, see below:
- Added endpoint for UDC deposits/withdrawals — this makes it easier to deposit and withdraw to the UDC contract, which is needed in order to use the Raiden Service Bundle.
- Support for the newest Ethereum clients
- Support for Python 3.9
- Faster sync times — when Raiden starts it needs to synchronize with the blockchain to make sure it is aware of all relevant onchain events. This process used to be very slow, but with Bespin the time it takes to sync has been significantly decreased.
- New “quick connect” functionality — the WebUI has introduced a feature that gives users a list of recommended nodes to open a channel with. This makes it fast and easy to connect to the network and maintain an optimal topology.
- Removed “join token network” endpoint — this functionality has been removed from the API and instead the functionality described above is advised.
- Removed refund transfers — this was originally meant as a quick way of unlocking funds in case of a transfer not being completed.
- Matrix rooms removed — the use of Matrix rooms has been removed. This reduces the load on the Matrix servers and increases the reliability of the transport layer. Additionally, this improves the privacy of Raiden, since channel balances are now only visible to the RSBs and channel partners.
A full changelog of the Bespin release can be found here.
Bug Bounty
There is currently still a bug bounty program in place for the Alderaan smart contracts. Bespin uses the same deployed smart contracts. This bug bounty has a pool worth $200,000 and will continue.
Deprecating Alderaan
Even though Bespin uses the same smart contracts that were deployed for Alderaan, the channels are not compatible. This means that users should close and settle open channels before upgrading to Bespin.
Feature Limitations of the Bespin Release
No upgradability of the token network: The Bespin release does not include the upgradability of the smart contracts. In other words, the only way to upgrade the network would be to redeploy new contracts; and release a new client version pointing to the new contracts. All channels in the old network would need to be closed and reopened in the new network.