district0x Dev Update - June 11th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

With the spring coming to an end and summer on the near horizon, district0x has been in its own transition as we break away from complete focus on Meme Factory and move back into a parallel development model, with Ethlance and the District Registry progressing alongside Meme Factory enhancements. In addition, we encountered some now resolved server configuration issues, planned the final necessary steps for resolving stuck ENS names on Name Bazaar, and we roadmapped a more user-friendly architecture for future applications relying on a separate chain.

Meme Factory

Our latest marketplace has seen quite a bit of progress in the past two weeks, with many smaller issues getting closed out, and several larger features in the works. The most visible of these is the in-progress Twitter bot that will broadcast various new submissions, votes, and marketplace offerings, and will be the first of several enhancements to Meme Factory that tie in more social elements to our platform.

Further on, we’ve been pushing forward with the aforementioned update to our database model, where we persist meme data onto our server as a cache for users to load from their browsers when necessary. This is a significant update, but will allow us to update Meme Factory frequently without having to worry about our server syncing blockchain content and leaving the users with an empty site. We expect this to be silently working before the next update.

District Registry

The District Registry has reached an impasse causing a bit of an unexpected rework. In order to proceed with the Aragon integration smoothly, it was necessary for us to migrate our deployment from our native Clojurescript to Truffle. This only touches a small portion of what’s already been built, and with that rework nearly complete we should be able to transition directly into spinning up a version of the DAOKit with the added feature of supporting native district tokens.

Name Bazaar

Last month we announced an issue we were combating involving the new ENS registrar and Nam Bazaar, and began to work directly with the ENS foundation team to implement a fix. After a bit of planning, coding, and thorough double checking with manual review, everything is in place and ready to go to rescue these names, and awaits confirmation on a transaction from the ENS team multisig in order to proceed to the next step. We should have as more detailed separate update for the entire community soon.

Ethlance

Development on Ethlance has only just restarted after a bit of downtime due to Meme Factory’s launch. Picking up right where it left off, our service providers are continuing to build out more of the front end components and testing them against the back end circuitry.

Additionally, as we mentioned in the introduction of this update, we’ve spent time roadmapping a different architecture for Ethlance that will fundamentally change when and how the user interacts with the blockchain on the app. In our current live version of Ethlance, virtually every action the user takes on their account, whether they are a freelancer or are hiring, requires a transaction with the Ethereum blockchain. Learning what we have from Meme Factory, we’ll instead be employing a private chain on the Ethlance 2.0 server that will allow users to commit many actions to chain for free. We will continue to leverage the Ethereum blockchain for important user actions, like dispensing wages or bounties, or arbitrating decisions.

In all, the development team is moving forward on each open project with more direction and purpose towards building. Every launch and refresh for us is an opportunity to improve upon our open source platform in order to achieve our original goal: a network of decentralized markets and communities. We will take every necessary step to get there.