district0x Dev Update - April 30th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past two weeks of progress for the district0x project focused on an array of issues, with the bulk of our time dedicated to the mainnet deployment and imminent launch of Meme Factory. The District Registry and Ethlance continue to see iterative progress on open lines of work. Lastly, in conjunction with recent announcements from the ENS team on pending updates, we’ve also had another sidetrack for development involving deprecation of our old ENS registrar flow on Name Bazaar. We’ll address these changes below, and discuss next steps for users in a future update.

Meme Factory

As Meme Factory enters the very final stages before deployment, our efforts have been scattered across a series of issues. Small bugs introduced as regressions from our new infinite scrolling implementation have all been un-kinked. New sorting and filtering options across the marketplace have been finalized. Documentation across the app is receiving necessary upgrades.

The DANK faucet in particular has had several of its more complex contract interactions mapped out, and in doing so we discovered a subtle but meaningful issue with the timing of the entire flow. Basically, if Oracalize takes too long to return a particular call, we have no way of surfacing this as feedback to the user in the application. Part of the fix here involved defining success not by the event confirming the DANK transaction was created or completed, but instead the success state should react to the even for DANK transfer completion. Beyond that, with Orazcalize’s help we’ve been able to employ a new method for payload encryption. All of this has afforded us an opportunity to re-examine exactly how we plan on migrating and deploying our QA instance on our production server.

This line of work lead us to a rather happy triumph. In previous updates, we mentioned the difficult we experienced with containerizing our production environment through the use of Docker containers. In particular, we were unable to sync our parity implementation when utilizing docker images — an unknown bug was making our sync runtime tend towards infinity. Through a stroke of luck, we’ve managed to resolve this, and now can return to a completely dockerized infrastructure for deploying Meme Factory.

This has allowed us to adjust configurations on our CI server so our Travis implementation can deploy both the production and QA instances of Meme Factory. In short, we’re able to much more closely match our production servers to our QA servers, and should avoid an entire class of unexpected errors as a result. At this point, we have just a few lingering issues with SSL certificates being ironed out, and nginx where we have problems correctly serving .SVG files to clients. All of these issues are expected to be resolved, allowing Meme Factory to migrate to Mainnet, before the next dev update.

Name Bazaar

As briefly mentioned in the introduction of this post, the Ethereum Name Service is planning a rather significant update with the pending migration to a permanent name registrar. On May 4th 2019, this migration will officially begin. At this point, all name owners who wish to keep their ENS domains must manually re-register their names before May 4th 2020. This is a very simple and straightforward process, however, it does leave us in a bit of a pickle in several ways.

Any names held in auctions or “Buy Now” offerings on Name Bazaar can’t be automatically migrated. This means any users who wish to keep their names will need to cancel any offerings and reclaim their names in order to complete the migration. This is complicated by another fact — that our registration flow on Name Bazaar is now defunct and needs to be updated. As a result, we will be taking Name Bazaar offline for a short period of time on May 4th in order to cycle in a few updates. If you want the smoothest migration possible for your names — please reclaim them as soon as you can. Expect more updates from us in the future on this matter.

We are in the home stretch for the deployment of Meme Factory, and as we coordinate the launch and marketing effort for an app we’ve worked so hard for, every contributor to the project grows giddy and restless to finally see this app come to light. We look forward to launching to the wider public soon.