Hub20 Blog

Hey everyone! One of the new year’s resolutions was to use this blog to make more frequent updates about new releases and to show all the new features that we are getting on Hub20. The big highlight of this release is definitely the expansion to support more blockchains beyond Ethereum, but there is a lot more interesting things to cover, so let’s get to it.

A Wider Web3

Hub20 started focused exclusively on Ethereum for its base layer and integrated Raiden for its off-chain scaling capabilities. And while we still personally believe in the overall goals from both projects - i.e, Ethereum being the network with viable decentralization and affordable nodes, Raiden being the network to make fast and cheap payments feasible - the undeniable reality is that Ethereum popularity has priced out anyone that wants to use it as a platform to accept payments. Even with Raiden’s latest release, the setup and onboarding costs are still too high to be attractive for larger audiences. It makes very little sense to try to accept payments with crypto when it costs tens of dollars to make a transfer, and It’s going to be hard to convince anyone to join a payment network that promises near-zero fees when you’d be spending hundreds of dollars worth of ETH when opening up a payment channel.

Some of our users asked about the possibility of making a version of Hub20 that could focus on Binance Smart Chain. Given that BSC uses the same RPC API as Ethereum, and that all our communication with Ethereum blockchain happens through this API, we quickly realized that not only we could support BSC, but we could easily add support for any blockchain that adopts the protocol and that works with ethereum’s web3 client library. A not-so-complicated refactoring later and we can now proudly say that you can run a hub with any combination of chains and networks at the same time. No matter if your potential customers are on Binance/Polygon/xDAI, you can accept payments from all of them.

The coolest thing about this, though, is how this feature lets us support other scaling solutions for Ethereum! It’s been long established that Ethereum is going to rely on a roll-up centric strategy to scale, and Optimistic Roll-ups such as Optimism and Arbitrum are already web3-compatible. All that a hub operator will have to do now is configure the correct entry in the admin panel, and in seconds they will be able to send and receive token transfers there.

More than one blockchain? How about more than one Raiden node?

This expansion into multiple chains is also going to be beneficial for those that want to use Raiden. The Raiden team is also working to allow the client to connect directly to Arbitrum, so as soon as that is possible, the costs to onboard and create channels are going to drop significantly and hub users will be able to make transfers at almost zero cost.

Having Raiden deployed on multiple chains and roll-ups bring the possibility of using it as a cross-rollup and even as a cross-chain bridge. It’s not difficult to imagine a future where someone wants to move tokens between, e.g Binance and Arbitrum, and having Raiden as the bridge would allow for atomic token swaps.

As part of this scenario, we also made it possible for hub operators to connect to more than one single raiden node at the same time. We hope to make it even easier for operators to launch new and manage new Raiden nodes without having to setup beforehand.

Token List support

Just like with the case of multi-blockchains, this release also brings lots of improvements on the support for any token that is compliant to the ERC20 interface. The previous version of Hub20 worked on the assumption that only the hub operator could define what tokens could be tracked. This new release makes things a lot more flexible:

Hub Operators can load information about any set of token that is published web URL that follows the token list schema. Want to load ~1000 tokens that are tracked by MyCrypto Wallet, or just want to get details about the tokens supported by Optimism? Easy! Operators can add tokens individually as well. The API now can accept token entries, and it will verify if the address is compliant with the ERC20 interface.

Users can now also manage their own token lists. This not only gives them freedom to create their own portfolio, but it also gives the chance to make use-specific token lists. If you are a merchant that wants to accept payments only with stabletokens but also wants to track tokens related to DeFI projects, you can easily manage these separately.

General improvements

The REST API now provides a lot more information about the token and the current status of the blockchain. Whenever you are using the frontend to withdraw funds from the hub, you will get the estimated transfer costs.

The API also now has a lot more powerful filters. You can filter the lists by chain. You can find only stable currencies that are pegged to specific fiat currencies. You can even find all the tokens that are wrapper of a native crypto (W-ETH, WBTC, renBTC, etc…).

The frontend has seen a lot of improvements in terms of general responsiveness and some small UX-details (identicon blockies for your profile!)

Hub Operators will be happy to know that the process that listen to blockchain events was vastly simplified and that the number of queries has been greatly reduced. The previous implementation was causing a huge number of RPC requests when lots of tokens were involved, but the current implementation removed this bottleneck and the hub is making one single request per new block.

What is coming next

The next release will be focused in the checkout widget and on the management of Raiden channels. We also need to play some catch-up with the documentation site to make it easier for newcomers to get start with their hubs.

You can always follow what’s on our roadmap by checking our Project Management page.

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That is it for this month. We hope you get to take a look at Hub20 and get as excited about the new features as we are. Come say hi at our Matrix room and please let us know what you think!