The District Monthly — May 2023
News and updates from the district0x Network
It’s that time of the month again! Welcome back to the latest updates from our developers, the latest news from our community game Aqua Prime, as well as some curated reads about the most important developments in web3!
TL;DR of what we will cover this month:
- Spotlight: Meme Coin Mania
- Discover our new Ethlance Bot
- Bringing Crypto to the Masses: Aqua Prime
- Latest DappStream Episodes
- This month’s Dev Updates
If you missed the last update, check it out here.
Don’t forget, we’re still hiring! We continue growing our bullpen of developers in 2023 to build out the tools of the future! If you have any experience developing smart contracts or web3 dApps, please email talent@district0x.io with a resume and an overview of your experience. We’d love to have you on board!
Now, let’s dive right in!
Spotlight: Meme Coin Mania: what drives the wild 100x pumps of the next generation of meme coins?!— by Henri.M
From DogeCoin to Shiba Inu and now to PepeCoin, the memetic power is alive and kicking in the crypto space. In our latest Spotlight article, we take a closer look at the history of memes and the recent meme coin mania.
Memes have massive influence. Fact. They have become an integral part of internet culture and for younger generations simply an integral part of their own culture and digital identities.
The term ‘meme’ was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins used the word to describe an idea or concept that could be ‘transmitted from person to person, just like genes are passed down from generation to generation’. However, the modern use of the term is associated with the internet culture, where memes have become a form of social currency.
But memes go even deeper in crypto since some degens have discovered that they can 1000x the force of memes when coupled with viral marketing campaigns and with liquidity games such as liquidity mining, vesting schedules, DEX strategies, and airdrops…
Want to learn more about Meme Coins? Read the full article: Meme Coin Mania: what drives the wild 100x pumps of the next generation of meme coins?!
This month we launched EthlanceGPT, an AI bot in our d0x Discord for posting, listing, and interacting with job offers. The Ethlance website will be functional in the near future as well, but this will give a more conversational UX. It’s a proof of concept that needs more testing, and you can help us test it out today!
It’s an easy to use Discord bot that helps you find and hire talented freelancers for your projects. You can search for professionals by their skillset or location. Once found, you can start negotiations with them and agree on terms of payment and delivery timelines. All payments are made securely through Ethereum blockchain technology so there’s no need to worry about fraud or scams!
So go ahead, give it a try now in our official Discord!
Bringing Crypto to the Masses
Aqua Prime, the Minimum Viable Metaverse
Are you curious about crypto but intimidated by its technicalities? If you missed our last update and with it, the launch of our game, fear no more: District0x is excited to introduce Aqua Prime, a game that makes it easy to experience web3 and crypto in a fun and low-barrier way.
Aqua Prime is a minimum viable metaverse that merges Discord, Twitch, and Web3, offering players an immersive, story-driven game that introduces them to the world of cryptocurrency and decentralized apps.
Aqua Prime is an open-source game that allows players to take control of newly sentient NFTs that have just discovered they’re part of a low-effort rug-pull scam project called “Tide Pool Platypus.” Trapped in a virtual world created by a Twitch streamer named Brady McKenna, the NFTs must fend off the memes that are corrupting their world by creating their own memes to fight back.
The game has a satirical edge, poking fun at the crypto industry’s jargon and culture.
Players can experience Aqua Prime in two ways. They can join Twitch and participate in the game as game masters, initiating boss battles using channel points. They can also join Discord and engage with the game’s content using AI-generated boss fights, leveling, and an economy bot that gives players who own various NFTs ownership over the game’s economy and income opportunities. The game has a TTRPG-inspired format that encourages role-playing, and players can earn rewards for nominating others for the best role-play.
The game’s Web3 aspect comes into play when players link their MetaMask wallet to Discord, unlocking special roles that give them new income opportunities and features in the game. Players can earn the TIDE token through gameplay, and NFTs can also be earned, giving players ownership over the economy in various ways.
Aqua Prime is a proof-of-concept game that shows what’s possible with Web3 and AI. The game offers a fun, safe, and lighthearted way to introduce the crypto-curious to Web3, and in a low-barrier way acts as an onboarding portal, so people can use the Dapps we build at District0x, and it gives creative ways to establish a wallet simply by playing a game. It pushes the boundaries of Web3 AI for storytelling and the meta aspect of connecting everything together.
At District0x, we believe in “Earn it, don’t buy it.”
We’re dedicated to building a community that rewards engagement, creativity, and hard work. Aqua Prime is just one example of how we’re making that happen. We’re using a mix of no-code solutions, open-source tools, hosted bots like Mee6, Start.it, Collabland and others, and our own tools to create a game that’s accessible to everyone.
We’ve built Aqua Prime on a public Replit-hosted instance of the bot, which means it can be freely forked by anyone. You can check out the code here: https://replit.com/@StreamTide/Aqua-Prime-or-GPT3-Testing#index.js.
We encourage everyone to contribute to the development of Aqua Prime. Anyone can add features, integrate their own favorite NFTs, and even earn bounties for contributing to the code.
Some players have already earned NFTs and become “owners” of the in-game Meme Factory and its in-game store. New players can also earn NFTs by joining the chat and using their creativity to negotiate with NPCs and game characters. One of our community members, GraspOnCrypto, held an NPC captive with a ransom and talked them out of a Meme Factory Medallion NFT, which gave them part-ownership over all in-game sales from the Meme Factory. Others have earned the ‘License to steal NFT’ and joined the thieves guild giving them access to the criminal side of the game economy.
We will continue to build out Aqua Prime and reward our most engaged community members with StreamTide & Meme Factory NFTs, memberships, and other perks, so stay tuned!
If you have any questions about the current developments, or if you simply want to join the fun and start playing, join our official Discord and get started now!
In the latest DappStream episodes, your favorite host Brady McKenna is back in action navigating various gameplays, including Aqua Prime and Mirandus, as well as keeping you updated on the latest crypto news and market trends:
You can also dive back into previous episodes on our Youtube Channel. 📺
A quick reminder that our DappStream schedule is once a week, focusing on quality over quantity:
- Tuesdays at 5 PM PT (Wednesdays at 2 AM UTC)
Monthly Dev Updates
Ethlance
As mentioned above, our new EthlanceGPT AI bot has been deployed in our official d0x Discord. It’s an easy to use Discord bot that helps you find and hire talented freelancers for your projects. You can search for professionals by their skillset or location. Once found, you can start negotiations with them and agree on terms of payment and delivery timelines. You can try it now in our Discord server!
This month our developers focused on implementing new features for employers and job seekers, such as inviting candidates to job offers and show invoices, as well as optimizing the relevant UX — like disabling forms for already invited jobs. We also started implementing candidate search, including relevant filters for employers to find suitable candidates.
In other news, we have developed a set of helper functions for Ethlance to interact with different token contracts that automatically get ABI (to initialize a Web3.Contract), regardless whether it’s a Proxy contract or direct deployment of ERC(20/721/1155). This should be useful in the future if developers want to programmatically interact with the contracts.
Furthermore:
- Debugged and implemented Job Contract page messaging functionality — to fetch & show sent messages and update the forms on send
- Documented main workflows of different users (candidate/ employer/ arbiters/ sign-up/ create job/ propose/ invoice/ disputes)
- Implemented inviting candidate on Profile page (incl. contract calls)
- Optimized the Show Invoices section (show content, amounts, relative timestamps…)
- Optimized feedback on Job page (candidate, employer, arbiter)
- Updated chat log on Job Contract page
- Implemented automatic sign-in popup on account changes
We are now removing legacy graphql querying in Ethlance to replace and use district.ui.graphql everywhere. Next we will implement the My Activity page for candidates, employers and arbiters. This will enable an overview of all activity of contracts (proposals, pending, active, finished, cancelled).
StreamTide
This month we’ve made considerable progress on the implementation of StreamTide. We’ve started working on “rounds” management, so that admins can start a new round, fill up the matching pool and distribute the matching pool based on donations using the quadratic funding formula.
Furthermore:
- Added accounts verifications, incl. Twitter and Discord account verification (still pending checking user roles on our server )
- Added wallet verification, enabling us to check if an account has a certain balance on different blockchains (ETH, Matic, …)
- Minor improvement to the re-frame-web3-fx library so that it can send transactions calling the “receive” fallback function of a contract
- Implemented contracts migrations to deploy contracts using truffle
- Implemented syncer to fill up our database based on blockchain events
- Added unit test for syncer
- Minor smart contract fixes
- Some UI polishments
We’re now working on implementing the quadratic funding formula, modified to allow assigning weights to the patrons based on the account verifications they fulfilled. We’re also implementing UI for the admins to easily manage and visualize the distribution of the fundings.
Meme Factory
After encountering some minor problems in production on Meme Factory, we have identified the cause of the issue: we hit some requests rate limits in Alchemy, the web3 provider we use for Polygon, causing the smart contract events to hang. We’ve pushed a change in the smart-contract library to do exponential backoff if it hits rate limits again. We’ve also implemented minimal modifications to make Meme Factory work with more recent versions of the libraries without having to port everything to shadow-cljs.
Transparency is a core value of district0x. You can find up-to-date disclosures on our overall progress in our GitHub Repository: https://github.com/district0x
District Proposals
Take these opportunities to earn more DNT and vote to either keep or get rid of the challenged districts. If you are on the winning side of the challenge, you will earn DNT from the Token-Curated Registry’s built-in incentives.
For more information on how proposals are now being migrated, please check out the District Proposal Rewards topic in this article.
Joining the district0x DAO
For more information about the district0x network,
• Head to our Onboarding Terminal for all links at a glance
• Check out our Education Portal for all things #web3
• Join the official Discord server or Telegram channel
• Watch the DappStream live or on our Youtube Channel
• Subscribe to email updates or to our Subreddit forum
