district0x Dev Update - June 25th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

Much of the past development cycle for district0x has been spent upgrading and rehabilitating Meme Factory as we address unforeseen issues with our production instance and its IPFS integration. In addition, Name Bazaar has seen all names stuck due to the issue with the new ENS registrar migration released, with subsequent cleanup efforts finalizing this yesterday. Work proceeds with both the District Registry and Ethlance at a steady rate, and new products have entered the brainstorming phase.

Meme Factory

Meme Factory has seen a wide array of development progress. From urgent unexpected fixes, to accessory additions to the original application, to infrastructure upgrades, and more. We will continue improve Meme Factory in the following weeks.

Among the most worked on is what we mentioned in our last update, a persistence model for storing and caching IPFS and meme data on our server, so that future updates can be done seemlessly without needing to sync website data against the blockchain. This will result in a better user experience whenever we push updates or restart our server. Alongside this, we encountered an unexpected issue between our AWS instance and IPFS last week wherein we were suddenly completely unable to fetch data appropriately from IPFS, resulting in blank meme images. This had quite a long diagnostic path relating back to our AWS configuration, but additional changes have been made to prevent this kind of fallout in the future.

Beyond this, the aforementioned Twitter bot has been constructed and is in active testing on our QA instance. Additionally, better leader board page sorting options have been made and are awaiting deployment, and further time-based filtering options (e.g. top curators from the past week) are in the works. We’ve also integrated a simple chat interface for Meme Factory users to discuss various content on the site. This is all currently in testing on our QA instance, and will be migrated to production in the coming weeks.

Finally, as Meme Factory is meant to act as a governable district and the Dank Registry lends itself to autonomous parameter changes, we’ve been taking the original designs for parameter change pages and making them functional with constructed front-end components. There is more work to be done in order to ensure the migration to production handles parameter changes at the smart contract level gracefully. With consistent progress, we should see the first parameter change become available in Meme Factory in the next month or two.

District Registry

The District Registry continues in modular fashion, with virtually all work except the Aragon integration having taken it’s final form, and the remaining research needed to complete the integration in progress. Following this, we will take another opportunity to refresh and rebuild the entire test suite, and then proceed to search for an in-depth audit as we plan the Mainnet deployment strategy.

Name Bazaar

Name Bazaar received work in the form of a rescue attempt for stuck names. After completing this and releasing thousands of names costing us quite a bit in gas fees, we were notified over this past weekend that some names still appeared to be stuck. After investigating, it looked like a simple case of a few reverted transactions out of a couple thousand completed ones. We re-ran all scripts in order to rectify this, and manually checked to be sure all contracts were clear. We’re now able to confirm that all names have been released from Name Bazaar and back to their owners.

If you have any issues, questions, or feedback on Name Bazaar and the ENS migration, or any of our other product offerings, please feel free to reach out at hello@district0x.io or hop in our Discord server for a chat. We’d love to hear from you!