Raiden Services

Introduction

The Raiden network includes auxiliary services, that enhance the overall user experience. These services include

  • finding short or cheap routes through the network and

  • allowing users to go offline safely by monitoring open payment channels.

Pathfinding Services

Pathfinding services have a global view on a token network can provide suitable payment paths for Raiden nodes.

The service will keep its view on the token network updated by listening to blockchain events and a public matrix room where current capacities and fees (Capacity Updates) are being published. Nodes can publish their channel capacities and fees in order to advertise their channels and mediate payments.

Using a Pathfinding Service

Using a Pathfinding service increases the likelihood of successful payments, especially when multiple mediators are used. Therefore, using a Pathfinding service is enabled by default.

Note

Direct token transfers (using no mediators) never need information from a PFS, so in that case no request for a PFS is done.

To disable the usage of Pathfinding services use the --routing-mode command line flag. This option is set to pfs by default, but can also be set to local or private if you don’t want to use a Pathfinding service. See below for further information about privacy implications.

Choosing a Pathfinding Service

By default the Raiden client will chose a suitable Pathfinding service for you. As all PFSs are registered in the service registry, it will iterate over all of them and choose one that has a fee which is lower then a given threshold.

This threshold can be changed with the --pathfinding-max-fee command line flag and is set to 0.05 RDN by default.

If you want to use a certain PFS, then you can set it by using the --pathfinding-service-address command line flag.

Sent information

The PFS relies on information from the individual Raiden nodes to keep its network representation up-to-date. Therefore the Raiden clients will send information about channel capacities and fees to the PFS by default.

This can be disabled by using the private routing mode, where no such updates are broadcasted. However, this also means that the PFS has no information about the channels of that node and will never mediate payments over these channels.

Monitoring Services

Monitoring services can watch open payment channels when the user is not online. In case one channel partner closes a channel while the counterparty is offline (or doesn’t react for 80% of the settlement timeout after close has been called), the Monitoring service sends the latest balance proof to the channel smart contract and thus ensures correct settlement of the channel.

Monitoring for channels is disabled by default. To enable it, the --enable-monitoring command line flag is used. This will enable monitoring for all open channels.

Note

It is currently not possible to enable monitoring for selected channels, but this will be possible in future version. This feature is tracked in this issue.

Sent information

In order to update the channel state the monitoring services need information about the channel state. For that reason, when monitoring is enabled, the client will send the latest received balance proof with additional information necessary for the payment of the monitoring services (see the spec for more information) to the monitoring services.

Monitoring rewards

The Monitoring Service expects a reward when it updates a channel on the user’s behalf. This reward is only paid out when the user did not update the channel state itself (this is handled by the Raiden client automatically). The reward is not configurable and has a value of 5 RDN.