district0x Dev Update - July 24th, 2018

Development progress and product changes from district0x

From a high level, the past two weeks of development are focused on all of the same projects as in our last update — Meme Factory’s individual pages, the District Registry backend, and planned Ethlance updates. After several battles we’ve managed to spin up the Aragon entity we will need to host the survey dApp. This is an important milestone for the community development effort around Meme Factory.

Additionally, we’ve outlined the ingredients required for an upcoming dApp we’re calling d0xTasks. This is similar in spirit to our original Name Bazaar prioritization dApp, only it will allow all manner of tasks — administrative, operational, developmental, and so on — to be bid for and decided upon by the tokenholders. More information on this will be published with the pending website updates and corresponding quarterly report.

Meme Factory Updates

Meme Factory development continues right along from the previous progress made. Each page is having its functionality built, pages styled, and end-to-end flows tested for any quirks. The meme submission form has been styled, as well as the meme marketplace components. Tooling and controls around our custom inputs library for each were improved.

The memefolio page has been completed with an unexpected devops task required therein — certificates that were sometimes failing in IPv6, normally a trivial issue, were not correctly defaulting back to the IPv4 certificates, causing problems for certain page availability.

The voting page for the Dank Registry has also been completed. As a result, we’ve been able to spend time testing the entire user experience — from meme submission to voting to reward collection. Front to back testing of this UX uncovered a few issues worth fixing, including a particular way we keep rewards synced with the blockchain.

At present time, we’ve transitioned into building all of the leaderboard pages for creators, collectors, and dankest memes, working on graphs and other small components of the voting flow, and making small devops wins to better maintain future server-side hygiene.

d0xINFRA Updates

Work on the District Registry remains entrenched in the underbelly of backend design. Specifically, we have faced the task mentioned last time in allowing unlimited concurrent challenges on a given district. This is a design pattern that will, we hope, be leveraged by many token curated registries requiring this feature.

From there, we proceeded towards an even larger obstacle: applying bonding curves to the district-specific staking mechanisms. This, as imagined, is a complex task not only from the technical perspective, but also requires very delicate fine tuning to achieve the desired behavioral output which MUST be paired with intuitive user experience. These systems are well developed in theory, but many of the most pressing design choices have yet to be made in practice. As with most things we build, we lean towards the simplest user experience to achieve the decentralized outcome as possible

Ethlance Updates

The team spent several hours as a group brainstorming what we can do to Ethlance to improve the user experience, as well as leverage the core promise of decentralized technologies to bring about something new. In previous posts we talked about the necessity of introducing some semblance of user profiles in order to bring the marketplace to the next level.

In the past week, we’ve been redesigning Ethlance’s front-end, wireframing it again from the basics and etching through our original design patterns for places where we can offer something unique. At this point, the bulk of the sketchwork using the old functionality has been complete, and we’ve begun with the new additions.

What’s Next?

As mentioned at the top of the post and in conjunction with our mission to become a completely decentralized project, we’ve been working on a district0x Network-wide dApp to host bids for service providers to contribute to the construction and operation of the district0x Network. As a core team we are bombarded with offers from businesses of all types to provide not only development support but also marketing, community engagement, translation services, and just about everything under the sun. This new dApp, called d0xTasks, will allow us to host a place for DNT holders to decide on which campaigns or contracts are bought or ignored.

There are many exciting initiatives on the cusp of completion here at district0x, and a confluence of long term projects coming together both internally and externally. We appreciate everyone who has stuck with us for the quiet period of production.