district0x Dev Update - February 4th, 2020

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The last month of development has been full of the kind tough concessions that have to be made in software when things aren’t working as expected. Our last update described the change in direction we’ve had to take on our work with a new Infura node, in favor of setting up on Geth instead. This work has culminated in a completely fresh build for Meme Factory being deployed to our QA instance.

In addition to the backend work, this build includes fixes for several accessory parts of the app. The twitter bot, for instance, started failing due to a lack of support for EIP-55 in our UI, causing a new case-sensitive failure instance with the post Web3 1.0 environment. This has now been fixed. We are fast tracking testing of this build in order to get it out to the public ASAP. A similar update is occurring for Ethlance in order to restore the original version to working order on our new nodes.

And then there’s the District Registry. Over the last two weeks, we’ve tried nearly half a dozen different methods for getting the linear and exponential staking curves to behave “smoothly” under a variety of simulations. Although we’re able to model the curves we’re looking for closely, there are too many circumstances where unstaking causes deviations that are too sizable to be acceptable, and could result in unexpected behavior for individuals.

As a result, we’ve made two different decisions regarding how to proceed. First, we’ll be launch the district registry as soon as we can with the “flat” staking curve in place. Our initial three districts were all meant to utilize only this curve, so we can still launch with the expected entries into the registry in place. The work to cleanly disable the other curves is already complete, and we’re moving from testing on QA to redeploying this to mainnet in the following days.

The second decision we made was to delay the release of the linear and exponential curves for a later date, giving us enough time to completely scrap our current work and start fresh with new research. We started constructing the smart contracts for the staking portions of the district registry way back in 2018, and the developer that touched them originally no longer actively works with the project. With the new simulation tools we’ve built and the personal insight into the problem we now have as engineers, we’re confident we can re-approach this from the ground up and get a much better solution implemented. We’ve designed the app to be extendable in this way on purpose.

As mentioned above, many of these results were unplanned and of course less than ideal, but we’ve the experience and wisdom to know that immutable systems like this deserve the full battery of scrutiny before they’re ever put into play for the public.