district0x Dev Update - December 10th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The Istanbul hard fork went live on the Ethereum Network over the weekend, and along with its successful deployment the district0x service providers capped off several major milestones for our project as well. Meme Factory receives another critical infrastructure upgrade, Ethlance has more of its backend developed, and The District Registry positions itself for an imminent launch. Let’s dive in.

Meme Factory

In our last update, we provided a detailed analysis of our then-pending migration from running Meme Factory on a Parity node to instead running on an Infura node. This was a change we had tentatively planned for the project from the early struggles with Name Bazaar development, and with Meme Factory features in a stable place, the time was finally right to sink our teeth into making this leap.

Although it was quite a broad initiative to undertake, we’ve completed the entire migration in the past two weeks, including some necessary back-and-forth between us and the Infura teams to confirm a fix we implemented to stabilize websocket connections. As of today, we have moved our entire QA instance of Meme Factory to rely on our new Infura node, and early testing has shown extremely promising performance. We will look to begin migrating this to mainnet and the live Meme Factory instance in the coming weeks following some more battle testing.

Ethlance

Ethlance continues down the same path as previous weeks, with front-end fixes coming in to various minor issues. Alongside this, a bunch of changes were made to our HTML5 URL routing to more closely mimic structure on other districts. Furthermore, we’ve finalized the scrollable CLJS-JS libraries (and even had our new library additions merged into the simplebar repo, nice!) and continue to clean up and slim down our latest application’s front-end.

Backend work as continued as well, with the entirety of the bounty smart contract suite being completed. Tests were implemented and as of today we’ve one failing test to still figure out before we can continue on towards the rest of the backend and server infrastructure.

District Registry

The District Registry remains our primary focus for development in the past few weeks. Where we last picked up, we were still in the throws of testing routines on the mainnet instance of the District Registry. After working closely with the Aragon team to get all of their applications properly installed to test districts, and confirming compatibility and persistence of certain crucial addresses across the Istanbul hard fork, we actually encountered an issue that prevented us from going live. In short, the creation of districts was unexpectedly running into gas limits that did not manifest in any previous testing scenario.

While some fixes were made to address this, we were actually afforded a more catch-all solution with the advent of Istanbul. Namely, Istanbul increased the total gas limits from 8 million to 9 million, completely invalidating the few edge cases we had where we’d run in to the 8 million limit.

As of today, we are continuing to test a fresh instance of the District Registry in this post-Istanbul environment. If all seems stable in the coming week, expect to see the District Registry live and public soon thereafter!