district0x Dev Update - October 17th, 2017

Development progress and product changes from district0x

Last Sunday we received the results from Nick Johnson’s audit of the Name Bazaar smart contracts. Since then, the team has been hard at work resolving the minor issues highlighted therein, and making various optimizations to the platform and website in order to ensure a smooth launch for Name Bazaar.

Website Updates

If you’re like me and you frequently navigate to specific webpages by typing out the entire URL, you may have noticed something a bit unusual with the district0x homepage. Most pages within a website will resolve to the same place with or without a trailing slash. For instance google.com/maps brings you to the same place as google.com/maps/ - just as expected.

Since being hosted on IPFS, we encountered an issue where the trailing slash was required in order to resolve to the correct IPFS path and show you the webpage you were looking for. So, unlike most of the rest of the internet, district0x.io/team was not treated the same way as district0x.io/team/. This turned out to be an involved fix, and we’re happy to share that this has now been implemented across all IPFS content we host.

Name Bazaar

We spent the first week of October implementing the final designs from our design team into the working testnet beta we’re using internally. With this completed, we can proceed with making fully interactive tutorials of all launch day functionality.

As mentioned above, we’ve spent most of the past week addressing the issues brought forth in the smart contract audit for Name Bazaar. Some of these were as simple as conforming to coding patterns enabled by the Byzantium Ethereum upgrade. Some are more complex styling and usability problems that we are tackling with future districts and d0xInfra in mind. Some are simple garbage collection — making sure contracts clean up after themselves.

Other changes include a more efficient “New Offering” contract execution, which should reduce the amount of gas needed to create a sale offering of a name by roughly half.

The “Create Offering” page

Additionally, we’ve introduced both error logging services and error handling, so that we may detect (and quickly respond to) any unforeseen and untestable issues that may arise as the dApp takes on more names, users, devices and general traffic.

Finally, we’ve pushed fix to the way Name Bazaar will handle node disconnects and reconnects, which should make the experience a little bit more seamless and clear for the end user should it happen.

What’s Next?

The next development update is scheduled for October 31st, Halloween. Half of the team here will be boarding planes to devcon3 that day. Between now and then we’ll be focused on getting Name Bazaar live on the mainnet and addressing any issues that may surface after launch.