district0x Dev Update - September 4th, 2018

Development progress and product changes from district0x

Continuing directly from progress made and shared in our last update, the past two weeks have been focused on the development of Ethlance’s wireframes and rewritten smart contracts, constructing the District Registry front end, and filling the mold on pieces remaining for Meme Factory’s launch. This includes the DANK faucet and associated verification methods, which will allow new users without any DANK an opportunity to acquire tokens for early meme submissions or curation participation.

In addition to the product development described above, we’ve been preparing various tech demos for upcoming training sessions, and taking the time to leverage the experience of our newest service providers in order to commit to a more permanent set of tools and packages for future district development.

Finally, the team will be participating in the ETHBerlin hackathon this week. The project or projects we plan to build have not yet been brainstormed, but with any luck we’ll have something to show for in the weeks to come.

Meme Factory Updates

Meme Factory development continues full steam ahead. With the initial results returning from the Meme Factory Survey dApp, we’ve been incorporating these back into Meme Factory itself. The Survey dApp has also presented a few maintenance challenges itself, although after several improvements to the interface it now happily houses all survey content, including the many user-submitted images for the upcoming contest votes.

Additionally, as always, progress continues on the styling for the individual pages of Meme Factory. Current focus is on the challenge page, with the Meme details page having just been completed. Furthermore, as mentioned in our last update, we’ve been conducting front-to-back user testing on the entire Meme creation, vote, and sale flow. This has revealed some corner cases for unintuitive or inconsistent user error returns across the mobile and desktop applications. The improvements we deploy here are minor from the engineering challenges they present, but make a world of difference in the final look and feel of the application.

Lastly, we are continuing to iron out the many novel issues encountered in constructing a phone-verification service for the DANK faucet. This battle mostly includes getting the appropriate solidity events to propagate correctly through our nodes and getting Oraclize to call out to the vendor’s API properly. We’re excited to share this with the wider world when complete!

What’s Next?

As mentioned in the introduction and in the previous update, are a few initiatives — the District Registry, Ethlance rework, and the d0xTasks app — all of which are in the more formative stages for our development team.

The District Registry has had its smart contract backend finished, and work proceeds on building out the front end required to allow users to migrate and submit historic proposals to the registry, as well as stake DNT to the district of their choice in order to receive governance rights. While much of the staking interface can be borrowed or repurposed from our other dApps, the submission and creation interfaces will look quite different from anything we’ve built before, and are expected to encounter their own UX challenges.

The Ethlance rework and d0xTasks dApp remain in roughly similar places. Both have had their smart contracts finished with the majority of the test suite completed to boot. Both dApps have been wireframed, and will proceed with front-end development after the team returns back from ETHBerlin.

As a project we seem to always find ourselves in a position with lots to talk about and little to put on display, or vice versa. On the eve of so many product launches that are pivotal to establish the core proposition of the district0x network, we find ourselves giddy with the coming opportunities to show rather than tell.