district0x Dev Update - September 17th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past two weeks of development for district0x have been dedicated to a few different initiatives. The District Registry remains in stasis while the smart contract suite is audited. Meme Factory development focused on a series of unexpected issues with our most recent deployment. Ethlance has had major portions of its front end finalized. And across the development team, discussions and planning around a migration to Web3 1.0.0 are taking place.

This week, the district0x organization is hosting its annual retreat for our service providers, so we’ll be providing a shorter update below.

Meme Factory

Meme Factory was updated alongside our last blog post two weeks ago. Following an unexpected outage on the IPFS side, a hot fix we deployed on the following Monday created a much problem that very nearly cost us several meme submissions. Fortunately, we were able to quickly react and figure out a solution in time.

Additionally, after deploying the parameter change page to mainnet, we discovered a concurrency issue with one parameter change type in particular — the vote quorum change. The end to the long saga of troubleshooting that followed is that we simply cannot support this parameter with the proposal and challenge process due to the nature of how parameter history is stored on-chain. Essentially, we need to reference a historical value in the same instance where we’re expecting the value to change.

Ethlance

Ethlance has been making slow and steady progress as a lower priority project of ours for the past few months now. As an application that already exists, but is being completely reworked from the ground up, we’ve deliberately left a lot of room in the development cycle for feature creep, allowing us to implement features we’re confident will definitively alter the user experience of our original district.

One result of this is in the wake of Meme Factory’s launch, we’ve decided to rework the planned backend for Ethlance to include an on-server private chain to serve most non-critical features for Ethlance, while retaining our integration with the Ethereum blockchain for critical features that we can’t risk being gamed. This backend work will begin when we finish the front-end work.