Raiden’s micropayment solution goes live on Ethereum Testnet

The Raiden Network’s work in progress to solve Ethereum’s scaling problems has hit a landmark as a test service called micro Raiden goes live on the Ehtereum Kovan testnet.
The Raiden network always held promise when it came to solving Ethereum’s scaling problem. Many people came up with a variety of ideas to handle the situation, but none seemed as convincing as the Raiden network. Now, the payment network’s promise is showing itself as it has launched a micropayment service that is a simplified version of what is to follow in the future.

Ethereum was always thought to be a blockchain network to power companies that want to oust giants like Facebook and Google. It was touted to be a network that will allow millions of transactions every second. While there’s no doubt that Ethereum is well on its way to achieving that status, there’s a problem it faces. The working of Ethereum depends on nodes and blockchains, where each transaction is added in a block and then chained together.

Once a miner verifies these transactions, more tokens of the cryptocurrency arise, and more transactions are made. However, each user downloads this growing blockchain. As the number of nodes and transactions increases, the amount of backlog of unverified transactions increases, increasing the load on nodes.

The Raiden network came up with the idea of having a separate network of nodes to ease the burden on Ethereum and facilitate more transactions. It simply takes off some of the transactions from Ethereum nodes to avoid congestion. This allows for faster verification of the remaining blockchains and results in a larger number of transactions each day. The transactions on the Raiden network take place on its state channels built using Ethereum’s executable distributed ERC20 code contracts. Users can use Raiden nodes for transactions, which work together with Ethereum nodes to communicate with other Raiden nodes.

Basically, it prevents the Ethereum blockchain bottleneck from negatively affecting its functionality by allowing customers to use a separate channel for transactions. This has been a work in progress for a while now, and Raiden’s new payment system called micro Raiden is a small version of the same.

Micro Raiden is a pay-per-use transaction system that allows users to make micropayments. While the Raiden network will eventually be a bi-directional system of payment, the micro Raiden system is unidirectional in nature. This will come in handy for a variety of payments, like payments for news articles, bandwidth, storage, pay-per-request APIs, etc. Moreover, the micro Raiden system is not simply a test system. It will be a separate entity working within the larger Raiden network. This micro Raiden network will serve the purpose of paying contributors for their work. This would be work like finding paths and monitoring channels.

This unidirectional payment system is something many users require. In the blog post that talks about micro Raiden, the Raiden network issued the following statement:
Talking to dapp developers, we noticed that many of them just want to use the Raiden network as a robust many-to-one payment channel system; one serice provider offering services to many recurring customers. Such systems do not require a full-blown network but instead already benefit greatly from direct payment channels’.

As of now, the micro Raiden project is limited to the Ethereum Kovan testnet. You can see the source code for micro Raiden on GitHub. Those who wish to see the project go live on the Ethereum network won’t have to wait too long to see it happening. Moreover, with the micro Raiden system out, people have even stronger hopes that the Raiden network can solve the scaling issues which Ethereum will definitely face in the future. Already it is struggling to accommodate the needs of all its users. At such a time, this news comes as a blessing and has a relieving nature.