raiden-contracts VS light-client

After the successful release of the 0.39.0 version of the smart contracts, the Raiden team focused on preparing the Raiden Light Client and Raiden Client for the upcoming release.

We have some great news related to the development progress. The Raiden contracts are ready for the Coruscant milestone. All the new features were included in the newly released 0.39.0 version of the smart contracts. The most significant new features include the cooperative settlement and the option to remove token network limits.

Preparing Raiden smart contracts for the Coruscant milestone is currently the highest priority. Support for removing both balance limits and token network count limits have been successfully implemented. Additionally, cooperative settlement was also completed a couple weeks ago. What remains open are improvements to the codebase (eg. better error messages) and gas optimizations.

The most interesting completed feature is support for disabling token network limits, which is being tested. Other progress includes minor maintenance and planning.

The information arbitrage is pretty remarkable because they get a bunch of money for printing air tokens out of thin air and selling a portion of it. They then use the money mainly to control narratives. How many people even know that literally all eth traffic runs through central infura servers? Why? Because it doesn't scale without central servers. It also doesn't scale on-chain which is what they promised 7 years ago when they asked you to give them bitcoin to create a turing complete blockchain. They tried a lot of other stuff before roll-ups with centralized sequencers with trusted multisigs. They even tried to copy Lightning and funded Raiden network.

Examples: Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, Ethereum’s Raiden Network

Think of the blockchain as being the settlement layer between banks, and each roll-up or payment channel as its own bank.

Raiden Network - an instant payment solution with low fees compatible with all ERC-20 tokens.

Just an FYI: with Hub20 you can accept payments with any Ethereum-compatible blockchain and any scaling solution that uses the RPC interface (e.g, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Gnosis Chain). It also works with Raiden, which is akin to BTCs lightning network.

Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with Ethereum already knows that the base layer is not meant to be used on day-to-day operations.

We already learned about the decentralization trillema. The strategy to scale Ethereum through will be through the adoption of "layer-2" systems, where users are expected to be doing their transactions and avoid these costly transactions altogether.

There are roll-ups already dealing with NFT marketplaces [0]. There are roll-ups that can execute any type of ethereum smart contract [1] [2]. There are payment channels that allow completely decentralized and gas-less transfers of ERC-20 tokens [3].

[0] https://loopring.io

[1] https://optimism.io/

[2] https://offchainlabs.com/

[3] https://raiden.network

Raiden Network, ethereum's equivalent of lightning network, has been live on mainnet since 2020. It has little to no traction/usage as rollups are a much better scaling solution than state channels.

For those that are technical, the main selling point is its integration with layer-2 systems and support for multiple chains. It doesn't matter if you want to accept payment with Raiden or Arbitrum/Optimism, or xDAI/Polygon or BSC, your frontend does not change at all.

The point you are so reluctantly refusing to see is that it is about options and the long tail. Yeah, the majority of business and people are fine with the status quo. It doesn't mean that the rest should just conform.

> Other than that, unless you use Nano, every crypto transaction comes with a fee (...) slower than normal transactions

- https://raiden.network (near-zero fee transfers, akin to Lightning Network, running on Ethereum)

Raiden network is probably the closest equivalent of lightning network, but there are a couple of other projects using similar technology on Ethereum.