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 and 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 messages send from individual nodes in which current capacities and fees are being published. Nodes can voluntarily publish this information in order to advertise their channels and mediate payments.
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.