Raiden Network - the future of payments?

Developers of Raiden Network - one of the most anticipated scaling solutions for Ethereum - have released an early version. The new version of the product was dubbed µRaiden (pronounced "micro Raiden"). It will allow micropayments between users through a network of nodes.

µRaiden is designed to facilitate a wide variety of payments:

“Applications that encourage recurring customer payments or even micropayments can greatly benefit from a µRaiden setup. Examples include paywalls for news articles, pay-per-request APIs, micropayments for storage, bandwidth, and computations, livestream tipping, etc.”

Furthermore, the solution is ERC-20 standard compatible, meaning it will work together with the tokens that have been recently issued on top of ethereum.

Blockchain payments

The project’s blog post states that the new version is tailored to decentralized apps (dapps):

"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 service 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."

There is no specific date when the solution will be transferred to the live blockchain, but the developers are optimistic underlining it may happen “very soon”. The source code for µRaiden is available via GitHub as well as a synopsis and examples from developers.

The Raiden Network ICO

In light of these events, Raiden Network is preparing to launch a token sale. The ICO, led by blockchain consulting firm Brainbot and its co-founder Heiko Hees, will occur in October. The team have announced a plan to hold a “uniform price Dutch auction” – where the price of the tokens declines over the course of the auction. This is done to prevent an unnecessary level of hype for the ICO.

The funds collected will be used for projects of the development team – namely finishing the µRaiden scaling solution and an early version of a completely new projected dubbed Raidos. There is very little information on it, other than the fact that it will be designed to operate with more complicated smart contracts. Any remaining funds will be used to fund decentralized applications on the Raiden network.