district0x Network Roadmap 2020

Where we’ve been and where we’re going in the coming year

With the district registry’s release firmly behind us, we thought it an appropriate time to give an update to the community of what’s in store both from a high level perspective on new development, as well as pending application-specific updates. This yearly roadmap update will serve in place of our typical development update.

Meme Factory

Meme Factory has received nearly all planned treatment from developers post-launch, and with the launch of the District Registry and it’s subsequent entity, Meme Factory will move into a new phase where maintenance and administration are slowly rolled out to the community via the corresponding Aragon entity on the Registry.

As a warm-up for this, we will begin hosting votes to determine contest themes for upcoming Meme contests. This will ensure we have a simple and straightforward introduction to DNT-based governance. Our current contest runs through the end of the month, so we will soon schedule a vote to determine the contest’s theme for the following month. Stay tuned for more updates on this via our regular commnuity channels.

District Registry

As mentioned in previous development updates, the District Registry was pushed live without the full repertoire of features we had initially planned, notably including the linear and exponential staking curves for Districts. We will be re-approaching this problem from the ground up, starting with fresh research of current trends in this area. This refactor is expected to take several months, and we will include regular updates along the way.

Alongside these planned feature additions, there is very little on the immediate horizon for the District Registry in terms of development — most of our time will continue to be spent on tooling for the marketplaces that will populate it. We will, however, continue to experiment with governance at the district-entity level. In the meantime, it’s high time to stake to the DNT to your favorite district if you haven’t already!

Ethlance

The Ethlance rework, dubbed Ethlance 2.0, has been in development for several months now. Requiring a full contract rewrite, this new app will offer all of the same features as the original Ethlance, but with many additions (arbitration, Bounties network contracts), as well as an entirely new architecture to make the user experience far cheaper and faster. All of this work will continue in earnest on Ethlance, which barring any changes to this plan, will be our next complete release.

d0xINFRA and the District Creation Platform

One of the biggest challenges we face with the District Registry and the growth of the district0x Network at large is developing the most frictionless and easy to use method of spinning up new districts and adding them to the registry. Up until this point, what defines a “district” has been relatively loose and determined mostly by the first marketplaces built on the network and placed in the registry.

With the advent of our newest project, we hope to change that. Now that we’ve gone through several complete software development cycles and have built and even refreshed our various web3.0 marketplaces, we thought it seems time to finally commit to taking down two major milestones for the project with one stroke.

To put it simply, we will be producing a District Creation UI, a new app (hosted as an extension of the District Registry) that will use modular components of our current marketplaces to allow users with no development experience to create their own marketplaces. Alongside this, we’ll be upgrading and documenting the various libraries and tools from the developer side in order to define the initial specification for d0xINFRA.

This plan has been ruminating among us for a while, but only with the recent completion of the District Registry have we had the developer time to commit to this. This project has only just begun as of this week, so we’re still in the initial phases of product planning, wireframing, writing specs, and the like. This will likely take the better part of the next year to all come together, with more resources being turned towards this as we complete Ethlance as well.

Future Districts and Beyond

Besides what has been mentioned above, there are still several other major roadmap items left to complete per our original whitepaper. The majority of these involve the creation of new districts on the network by the district0x organization. Previously, we hosted votes on the http://vote.district0x.io/ dApp in order to surface which District Proposals our community of token holders wanted to see built next. This was always a temporary solution, and the first leading proposal, 1Hive, directly influenced the use of bonded curves in the eventual District Registry. And now that we have the registry, we can begin to use this as a signaling mechanism instead.

And so we’re making this commitment — with the completion of the aforementioned roadmap items (Ethlance, d0xINFRA, and the District Creation Platform), we will select the unbuilt district with the most DNT staked to it on the District Registry, and as an organization we’ll build it.

Together, all of the above will take us well into 2021. As always, we’ll continue to provide bi-weekly development updates as well as host regular community livestreams to give updates on our progress.