district0x Dev Update - October 31st, 2017

Development progress and product changes from district0x

Welcome to a short and sweet post-launch Halloween edition of our bi-weekly development update. The previous two weeks have all been dedicated to the roll out of Name Bazaar and some of the most heavily requested features that came our way in the first week.

We’d also like to take a quick moment to plug the district0x Network Rocket Chat migration. We’ve begun the process of winding down Slack in favor of using Rocket Chat. You can join the conversation here and thanks to a one-way bridge, see all of the messages sent in both Rocket Chat and Slack.

Name Bazaar Updates

Name Bazaar launched on Tuesday, October 24 without a hitch. For more details on the full function of the dApp, see the Introducing Name Bazaar launch post.

Since that day, we’ve been working on a few different updates. The biggest is a new sold offerings page, that shows the history of all recently sold names on Name Bazaar. You can find this page under the “Offerings” option in the main left-hand menu. This gives Name Bazaar users the ability to look at the name and prices sold throughout time and hopefully inform pricing on new listings.

Additionally, work continues to be done on making the user experience for account switching on MetaMask and Parity smooth, as well as improvements for how the dApp handles parity losing connection to peers after completing an actin like requesting a name or creating an offering. These type of improvements will be an ongoing effort.

Finally we’ve also begun splitting logic needed for d0xInfra off and decoupling it from the Name Bazaar in anticipation of the preliminary planning necessary to architect Meme Factory.

What’s Next?

In addition to the ongoing efforts mentioned above, we also hope to push more logic into how Name Bazaar handles and resolves specific name URLs in the next few weeks. We also are constantly improving our error logging, fixing issues that arise with new traffic, and removing the logging of errors that aren’t actually errors.

From a higher-level, one of the team’s most unexpected takeaways from the first week of Name Bazaar was just how little proliferation of Ethereum Name Service and name registration has occurred, and how we are in a prime position to influence that. We expected questions and confusion on how to actually register names — we produced a tutorial video on registering names using MyEtherWallet in anticipation of this.

However, the more we linked and walked first-timers through this process, the more we felt strongly that it can be improved. We are proceeding with a new plan to integrate a registration flow for ENS domains directly into the Name Bazaar dApp itself, in hopes of simplifying the process for all Ethereum users and becoming a one-stop-shop for all things ENS related. We hope to have more to share on this soon.

Once again, thank you to all of our supporters who have made this development possible.