A team of ethereum developers has successfully completed what they say is the first off-blockchain transaction on the decentralized application network. Sent from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Mumbai, India, the test saw the developers behind micropayments project Raiden send ether via clients operated by members in those cities last week. While small in scale, ethereum developers more broadly see the proof-of-concept as a key technical step toward solving one of the pressing issues facing not only the network, but all public blockchains. Ethereum and bitcoin, for example, currently each support only a fraction of the transactions seen daily on centralized payment networks like Visa or MasterCard. As developers seek to take on this challenge, scaling is widely seen as a fundamental issue yet to be solved. But, there are advancements being made. Raiden, a team of five working to bring microtransactions to the ethereum blockchain, draws inspiration from the Lightning Network , an in-development off-chain transaction network that’s often trumpeted as a fix for scalability on the bitcoin blockchain. Together, the emergence of the two networks can be seen as evidence small advancements toward this wider goal are being made across blockchain communities. CEO of Brainbot Technologies Heiko Hees, who leads development of Raiden Network, explained the significance, telling CoinDesk: "We now have the alpha of a system to do scalable, fast and extremely cheap token transfers off-chain in ethereum." Once the network moves beyond the testing stage, users will be able to tap Raiden for a variety of ethereum applications, he said. This could include making micropayments for seconds spent watching online videos or facilitating trade in Internet of Things-enabled markets, where machines pay other machines for chunks of bandwidth or temperature sensor data. Already, the prediction market Gnosis and the file storage system Swarm plan to build on […]
