district0x Dev Update - October 1st, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The district0x organization spent the last two weeks of development transitioning away from persistent Meme Factory development, and re-gearing towards more infrastructural updates, while several more service providers hop in to provide assistance with the planned architectural changes for Ethlance. Since few of our updates are application specific, we will forego the normal app-based headings we usually employ for these updates.

Additionally, the District Registry has been under audit for the past two weeks, and as of the beginning of this week we’ve received back a final report with recommendations on several changes to improve the reliability and security of our smart contracts. As we work through these fixes and re-test any alterations, we will begin preparing our mainnet migration and will look to launch the District Registry in the coming months.

Alongside this, we’ve had time to go back and review our implementation of GraphQL. Originally, our GraphQL modules did not effectively handle mutations in a way that provided much benefit to justify its use. However, we were somewhat hand-tied during development of Meme Factory, and stuck with what we had built at the time. Now, we’re working on improvements to the district UI GraphQL libraries so every GraphQL request on our web apps can send tokens and handle mutations.

Further along, we’re also working to complete an overhaul of our d0xINFRA libraries in order to migrate them to Web3 version 1.0.0. So far, we’ve finished migrating the protocols and most function signatures, but our implementation is only partially done. We’ve updated many back-end libraries to cooperate with the new version’s missing JSON RPC codes by utilizing a neatly provided method for extending all recognized codes. This allowed us to maintain a huge chunk of “backwards compatibility” with our previous web3 integrations. We’ve still got a few kinks to work out before proceeding with documentation and test coverage, but we expect to see this in use in future dApps.

As for application development, Ethlance has seen some progress since the screenshots we provided in the last update. Namely, every single page has now been finished, with a fully animated splash page to boot. Since Ethlance is now falling under the purview of more developers, time was also spent documenting and fixing configurations for dev environments, accelerating the rate at which new lines of work can be added. In step with this, we’ve begun building the transaction signing functionality we will need server side, in order to build a smoother, more fee-free experience for users as discussed in previous updates.

Altogether, it’s an exciting time for the team as we lock-in to new projects and start building momentum. With the District Registry nearing mainnet launch and Ethlance on the distant horizon, we expect to have many visible updates to share with the community in the coming months. Stay tuned!