district0x Dev Update - August 21st, 2018

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past few weeks of development at district0x have been focused on a number of initiatives related to the launch of Meme Factory or preparation of our following planned releases — our Ethlance rework, the District Registry, and the d0xTasks dApp. The latter two will serve as the platform for informing future districts introduced on the network by service providers. This is essential for achieving our vision of becoming a decentralized platform for development.

Alongside this work, we managed to push the Meme Factory Surveys live, leveraging Aragon’s survey contracts in the process. Further work and research is being done to construct the DANK faucet that will allow early users to participate in the early days of Meme Factory. This includes a basic form of user verification to claim tokens.

Meme Factory Updates

As in previous updates, the bulk of Meme Factory work is dedicated towards styling the remaining pages associated with leaderboards, the Memefolio, and the meme detail page. In the past week in particular this has included extensive mobile styling on the registry, and more usability testing. These tests revealed a couple of bugs to squash with account balances and meme issuance, both of which are now fixed.

The Meme Factory Survey dApp was also deployed last week, after a very rapid construction. This not only houses all of the functionality needed to participate in the survey, but also all of the content for users to vote on, as well as scorekeeping for upcoming DANK token issuance. We will continue to deploy new surveys every Monday — the process is not automatic, so keep an eye out in Slack, Telegram, or Twitter for the go-ahead signal.

DANK tokens will need a way to be issued to interested Meme Factory users who don’t currently have DNT to vote in surveys or the skills to contribute to the design contest. So we are constructing a faucet to run on Meme Factory’s launch in order to provide users with enough DANK to submit their first meme or vote in the registry. This faucet will be limited use per user — enforced by a phone based registration flow that we are currently building. As mentioned at top of this post, this involved a bit of research and planning before committing to the final specification.

Ethlance Updates

Phone registration for users is one small part of a larger vision we’re heading towards. We discussed previously the necessity of introducing a concrete notion of user accounts in order to open the doors on the design space for future districts. Ethlance is a prime example — and as we proceed through wireframing our redesign, we are incorporating new features leveraging user accounts in order to enable arbitration for the marketplace. Trustless reputation and clear service histories attached to particular providers will help qualify each Ethereum account as “qualified” to arbitrate a given job. Ratings can even inform pricing of the services provided. We’re excited to share more about our planned updates for Ethlance in the coming months.

What’s Next?

There is much progress being made on initiatives not captured above. This includes construction of the smart contracts required to deploy the d0xTasks app, as well as testing and documentation surrounding this. In preparation for several upcoming conferences and in conjunction with recent onboarding efforts, we’ve also developed a tiny demo application that utilizes our architecture. This demo will eventually be migrated into the education portal and will serve as the beginning of a much broader effort to incorporate developer documentation therein.