Introducing Meme Factory

A decentralized marketplace and registry for a new kind of rare digital collectible

Today, the district0x project is happy to announce our largest milestone yet with the public launch of Meme Factory and the distribution of its complementary ERC20 token, DANK.

The idea for Meme Factory is as old as the district0x project itself, and marketplaces for digital collectibles have existed on Ethereum for some time now. But what makes Meme Factory new and different is that at its core it leverages users as active stakeholders to power content creation and curation, as well as ultimately governance over its operation. It’s been a long journey getting here. To recap a rough timeline:

We brainstormed an idea for a curation marketplace for memes, loosely based on Simon de la Rouviere’s work on Curation markets.

We leveraged Adchain’s Token-Curated Registry design along with a commit/reveal voting scheme to build a completely decentralized content registry.

We built a server architecture to store registry data on IPFS, and the necessary GraphQL bridge to communicate it out to clients.

We ran a Meme Factory Design Contest to seed the registry with content.

We launched the Meme Factory Surveys as an Aragon-powered dApp in order to disseminate consensus on several design decisions, as well as pick contest winners to seed launch day content, with our community.

We constructed a new ERC20 token, DANK, and a phone-based verification service to dispense it through a faucet.

And we, of course, developed all manner of front and back-end code necessary to push Meme Factory live today.

We’ve produced a ton of supporting documentation discussing the specifics of Meme Factory’s user experience including our How it Works page, video tutorials, and a guided in-app tutorial. We’ll use the rest of this post instead to detail more of our launch-day updates and content, as well as some brief explanations of initial parameterization of the registry.

The Dank Registry

Roughly two days ago, we completed our migration of the Dank Registry to the Ethereum Mainnet. Since then we’ve placed hundreds of pre-release memes into the registry in order to have a full and vibrant marketplace from the moment this post is published. These include a set of ultra-rare 1 of 1 memes, hand crafted and selected by our community as winners in the Meme Factory Design Contest, as well as a special genesis card. In addition, we’ve submitted several series from in-house artists we contracted prior to the launch of Meme Factory. We’ve introduced these in varying rarities and at different price points.