Tech Talk: Raiden Network, Ethereum, and SmartMesh Ecosystem

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, tweeted that he would support the Raiden Network with his own fund, so that Raiden will not need an ICO. However, the Raiden’s Token (RDN) has been launched last week after Heiko Hees, the founder of the Raiden Network, communicated with Buterin for several weeks.

Many people wonder how Raiden is able to attract such attention from Vitalik? To solve the mystery, Bing Li (founder of the MuYan Blockchain College) and IBAF (International Blockchain Application Federation) hosted a Tech Talk regarding the value of the Raiden Network and its token. An important member from the Raiden team and Henry Wang (president of IBAF, founder of Firefly SmartMesh) gave their insightful opinion on Raiden and its future development.

Last month, Vitalik stated the community shall scale to Visa levels capacity in just two years for a meeting at TechChrunch 2017. “I would say two to five, with early prototypes in one year. The various scaling solutions, including sharding, plasma and various state channel systems such as Raiden and Perun, are already quite well thought out, and development has already started. Raiden is the earliest, and its developer preview release is out already.” In this sense, the Lightning Network is the earliest scalable solution for Bitcoin, and the Raiden Network is the earliest scalable state channel architecture for Ethereum.

However, why did Vitalik say no to Raiden’s ICO at the very beginning? Essentially, the Raiden token (RDN) is not necessary at the core protocol level of the Raiden Network. Similarly, there is no token in Lightning Network nor in Plasma. The Tech Talk between Henry and Raiden Network would thus provide a deeper understanding of RDN and its integration with Ethereum. Topics like future development of Raiden, SmartMesh-Raiden integration and IoT were also discussed. Following is an excerpt from the Tech Talk:

What’s the value of Raiden's token, RDN?
“RDN token is not needed in the core of the Raiden Network”, the member of Raiden said. Essentially, opening or closing payment channels, sending transfers will not involve RDN at the protocol level.
However, the followings are the value of RDN token:
Such a P2P network (Raiden Network) needs auxiliary services like routing algorithms to find the best path from A to B, and to C, or monitoring services to prevent cheating. The light clients in the Raiden Network, such as small computers installed on cellphones or cars, which would not wish to sync the entire blockchain, may use the RDN token to pay for such auxiliary services in the system.
RDN token has a fixed supply, so the more users using it would lead to a higher valuation.
The Raiden team believes that this token is to align all stakeholders and keep the expert team working on the technology. With their own token, the network would be more secure on the Ethereum network.
How would Raiden Network and Ethereum integrate

Raiden mentioned that at least three of the Raiden developers helped developing Ethereum from the very beginning. And as a result, Raiden and Ethereum are well connected from development perspective.

From the technology perspective, Raiden also works with other EVM compatible blockchains currently and could be compatible with cross-chain token transactions in the future.

SmartMesh-Raiden use cases

Firefly SmartMesh is a mobile device protocol network, where cellphones are connected through WIFI, Bluetooth, ANT, and other near-field protocols. User can send text message, make voice and video call, and browse SmartMesh cached distributed web pages while without any internet connection. If one device of the network has internet connection, the entire SmartMesh network can connect to the internet via Raiden Network based SmartMesh micropayment extension. Micropayment incentivize users with internet connection to share the connection with the entire SmartMesh network, which would be an ideal solution for congestion issues in the big cities as well as connecting 4 billion people unconnected for living in areas with no or under-developed telco infrastructures.

From Raiden Network view, firefly SmartMesh can use a token really well. To incentivize people to join the network for example. And raiden technology could provide this, plus payments or message signing. Without a third party you would need to trust

As a pioneer of off-internet communication, Henry, the founder of SmartMesh mentioned that the collaboration between SmartMesh and Raiden would accelerate the development of payment routing technology. There are some mesh project doesn't provide token circulation mechanism correctly even in whitepaper because the Ethereum transaction is too slow and it cannot support their described way of on-chain token incentivization. Some provide a correct way to do token circulation mechanism. Unfortunately the way they described is that they are going to do it by themselves from creating state channels to building large routing mechanism. That will take several years for sure.
Raiden developed for two years, why not Firefly SmartMesh works with Raiden to accelerate the state channel and payment routing mechanism, so we will be the first to have practical SmartMesh product reaching the market.
Nevertheless, Raiden Network could not work without the internet, while SmartMesh’s Raiden extension can change that, and make mobile, off-internet micro payments possible. Henry stated that this would be the first time in the history that human-being can make crypto payments without the internet.

Raiden and SmartMesh could build a new ecosystem
Raiden stated that “blockchain is a collaboration topic at it’s core, and it’s open source. That’s perfect for working together.” All the third party Raiden service providers and partners can benefit and make profit by providing services and get RDN as rewards.

Henry said, “Currently, Raiden Network is implemented on PCs and Servers. While SmartMesh has already implemented Ethereum nodes on cellphones, we started working on Raiden’s mobile implementations. After SmartMesh goes to the market, more applications can be built upon SmartMesh protocols so we can build a new ecosystem, and all SmartMesh nodes and users will be integrated into Raiden Network. Imagine that you could connect to countless smart devices without cable or coaxial line in the next generation Internet of Things, only SmartMesh + Raiden can realize IoT at such a large scale with efficiency, and eventually realize the Internet of Everything. This would be a huge market.”

Henry also believes that most of the cryptocurrency transactions will be made off-chain in the future, and most data traffic will be within private, local SmartMesh off-Internet. Henry mentioned that he discussed this with five 8btc co-founders, and they reached a consensus. The collaboration between SmartMesh and Raiden will no doubt be a win-win situation. Raiden shifts most of the transaction off the Ethereum chain, and SmartMesh shifts most of the data traffic off the internet. They will work together to carry huge network traffic and digital currency transactions in the future. SmartMesh, integrating with Raiden and Ethereum, could build the next generation Blockchain-Mesh application ecosystem.