district0x Dev Update — July 11th, 2017

A network of decentralized marketplaces and communities

We’re in the final week before our initial contribution period begins for the district0x Network on July 18 at 3 p.m. UTC. You can view our contribution website here.

Being a new addition to the team, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. I first discovered the world of cryptocurrencies and the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2011 while at the University of Michigan. At the time, I was quite into building desktop machines, and any unused machines would be put to work curing diseases through the folding@home project.

When I first discovered that I could use the same computational power to generate a new kind of money that no government controlled, value that lived ON the internet and was secured BY the internet, I was immediately hooked.

I joined Coinbase in early 2015 as the industry continued to grow around me. The challenge of bringing mainstream adoption to rather niche and poorly understood technologies was thrilling. The bridge between the old and new worlds of finance is and will remain a critical piece of infrastructure in the years to come.

Witnessing the advent of the Ethereum network and the broad and deep ecosystem it has spawned has been awe-inspiring. Now more than ever we’re within reach of truly decentralized applications taking forms that we only fantasized about when I first stumbled in to this space.

Joe Urgo was a colleague of mine at Coinbase and a close friend of mine ever since. When he first stumbled into Ethlance and shared it with me, I couldn’t believe the app I was interacting with was executing completely auditable smart contracts in order to serve a website that even my grandmother could use.

As 2017 came to pass, Joe and Matus continued brainstorming on what was next. When the idea of districts, a more “generalized” abstraction on Ethlance was born, it was like the floodgates for new ideas had been opened.

Every day I wake to an ecosystem where all layers of the future we’re heading towards are being developed in parallel. As protocols get fatter, middleware gets richer, and the infrastructure holding everything up gets stronger, it’s clear that we’re primed and ready to start transforming the world of web and mobile applications towards a brighter vision. district0x offer the opportunity to democratize the deployment of marketplaces and communities, and that’s why I joined.

Website and Team updates

We’ve hired a software project manager — me! We’ve added two new advisers, Brayton Williams of Boost VC and Vincent Zhou of Fintech Blockchain Group.

We’ve updated the website to accommodate our new team member as well as a few new advisers and supporters. We’ve also added the option to instantly toggle between Chinese and English translations.

Contribution Period Smart Contracts

All three security audits for the contribution period smart contracts have been successfully bid for, paid, and completed through Ethlance.

Thanks to Ahmad Ali for his audit here!

Thanks to Adam Dossa audit here!

Thanks to Jordi Baylina who will be publishing his audit via a blog post shortly. We’ll be sure to include that when complete! Update: Now available here.

We’ve made several final changes to the contribution period smart contracts as a result of these detailed audits. We’ll announce movement into the next phase of a public bug bounty program shortly. Stay tuned!

Name Bazaar

Development of Name Bazaar continues on! In our last update we discussed the rename and the work on the d0xINFRA smart contracts to power Name Bazaar’s back-end.

We’re pleased to share the smart contracts have been finished! We’re now moving on to work on the Name Bazaar front end.

Join the Community

Our Slack community has grown to nearly 1300 members already! Come join us to ask any questions you may have about the project, share your feedback and suggestions, and to take part in the Community Advisor Program. You can also subscribe for email updates to stay current on our latest news. We look forward to chatting!