district0x Dev Update - March 17th, 2020

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The most recent development cycle has been a busy one for the district0x organization, despite the challenges facing workers globally. Across the board we’re charging forward with three different development efforts: Wireframing and design for the District Designer, migrating our live applications to Infura, and continuing to integrate Ethlance with standard Bounties contracts as well as ironing out the UI router.

d0xINFRA

For months now, we’ve been detailing a back-and-forth battle over our current node implementation. We recognized in late 2019 both a pressing need to migrate away from parity, a consistent point of failure for us, as well as an opportunity to do so with the release roadmap in 2020.

After several major design hurdles were cleared, we attempted and failed deployments of a setup using Infura late in 2019, and went back to the drawing board considering all options. Experimenting with Geth actually led to a realization of a new way to architect Infura for our purposes.

So, in the past month, we’ve been migrating our applications in their entirety over to Infura. We encounter relatively little resistance in doing this on the application itself, however, the test suites for each application need delicate reworkings to ensure they achieve the same result. This has been particularly true of the parameter change portions for Meme Factory and the District Registry.

Despite this, we’re happy to report that as of today we’ve got Infura working on the District Registry QA instance, and should see it move to mainnet barring any irregularities in the next testing cycle.

Ethlance

Ethlance continues to split developer time across several different fronts: the server, database and its pursuant documentation, the completion and testing of the UI router, and finally the integration of standard Bounties contracts.

First up is the server, for which we completed the in progress data syncer, and brainstormed on ways to test with “fake” contract data ahead of launching an entire QA instance. This led to a series of discussions around the greater Ethlance DB model and its documentation, resulting in the use of some tools to help diagram everything out and ultimately re-organize pathing and naming a bit.

This work bled over directly with the integration of the standard Bounties contracts, which up until now we’ve been using directly almost without alteration. We’ve seen that while the contracts as-is will support all features we imagine for launch day, there are some we have discussed that would require extensibility not offered by the standard contracts — and so we’ve expanded upon them.

Finally, work has continued on the front-end of Ethlance, in particular chasing down bugs in the UI router that have only surfaced as we’ve started populating dev environments with data.

District Designer

Our latest application, now dubbed the District Designer, will allow regular users to spin up their own custom Ethereum based marketplace and leverage many decentralized portions we’ve built into our applications in a modular fashion.

The past few weeks have been full of mostly wireframing and initial feature design. In many ways we only had a rough imagination for what our application would look like. It wasn’t until we actually started laying out and configuring the menus that the complexity of a “dApp that creates other dApps” began to take form.

This discovery process also led us to a new, fine-grained set of feature requirements. For instance, we had always envisioned “supporting ERC721 markets”, but upon developing the forms to allow users to parse ERC721s, we realized there were additional requirements and custom forms needed to support users parsing *all new*, previously unknown ERC721s.

Besides the listing configurations and their token parsing forms, we’ve built out and then resimplified all market listing configurations, as well as the marketplace modules. These may sound a bit esoteric for now, but we hope to have somewhat more polished previews to share with the community in the coming months.