district0x Dev Update - May 14th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The most recent development cycle has been one of several massive milestones for the district0x project and its service providers, as well as a handful of important small victories that bring us one step closer to our ultimate vision. Among these are the deployment and migration of all our services to a new production server architecture, construction of smart contracts to assist in fixing Name Bazaar, as well as the distribution of DANK, and updates to accommodate MetaMask’s privacy mode.

Meme Factory

Meme Factory continues racing towards our expected launch day with a few minor additions as the team begins uploading and preparing content for the marketplace. We’ve implemented a new Terms of Service and Privacy policy page, and made complementary refactors of our DANK faucet and My Settings pages in order to accommodate some new disclosures.

On the devops side, we also managed a complete migration to our new continuous deployment production server, and we’ve managed to “Dockerize” pretty much everything, including our old dApps. The only domain that currently is not move is the static memefactory.io page, which will be replaced with the upcoming launch of the full app. Smaller fixes, such as a problem with certain assets not rendering, were fixed and deployed. Our new mainnet node instance was set up on the production server. We tested and moved any remaining services like production log shipping and Cloudwatch, as well as alarms and monitoring systems, from the older server to the new one, and finally deprecated the old server.

We also worked out a script for distributing DANK according to the Meme Factory Survey participation outputs, and of course accounting for the winners of our Meme Factory Design Contest. We’ve double checked and corrected for intended amounts, and finally moved forward with the actual distribution of DANK out to end users and our own internal systems. The faucet was debugged and documented a bit more alongside this, and tested on the mainnet for speed and reliability. After testing, we tried to find a way to speed up the external calls leveraging Twilio/Oracalize, but unfortunately there were few options as we’re pretty tightly bound by their constraints.

Lastly, as mentioned above, MetaMask pushed a quiet update to the mandatory transaction signatures required by every compatible Web3 app when a MetaMask user has privacy mode enabled. In short — every single district0x dApp should now properly prompt for and accept this transaction signature when privacy mode is on.

Name Bazaar

Last week we shared an update concerning the new permanent ENS registrar, and how it’s migration resulted in some very unexpected hurdles with the ongoing maintenance of Name Bazaar. Since then, we’ve made solid progress towards a permanent fix.

After the initial shock and a few rounds of debugging, the solution we found requires us to produce a new smart contract for release of names, combined with a coordinated transaction from the ENS team in order to get all names released and Name Bazaar back in working order.

As of today, we’ve produced a first draft of the contract containing the majority of the requisite fixes. After sending to the ENS team to review, it was agreed that we need to have this contract more closely simulate what we currently have live on the mainnet before finally committing the change. We expect this to take another few weeks before full resolution, and we’ll be sure to keep everyone updated through this blog as well as our social media.

As we’ve recently tweeted, Meme Factory’s complete launch is imminent, scheduled for tomorrow. As a project with several large products in active development, we’re excited to see not only what is by far our largest undertaking make it into the hands of the public, but also to use what we’ve learned from this long journey to begin improving the rest of the of our current efforts. We hope to see you on the Meme Factory!