Digix Dev Update — 12 Sept 2017

Business Update

Big thank you to our survey contributors

We will provide a contribution of DGDs as a token of our appreciation to Digix supporters who have completed a short Digix survey recently, end of this week.

REIDAO Meetup

As part of Ethereum Singapore Meetup, Digix organized an event for REIDAO this evening at SGInnovate.

REIDAO is creating tokens (digital assets on Ethereum) backed by real estate with its unique Token ID (think stock-ticker) for every property that is listed on the platform. Every Token ID will have its own cap of tokens available/created, its own valuation — based on the property that is backing it, and its own track record (of price movements, rental income/dividend, and so on).

Developer Update

Anthony Eufemio (CTO)

During last week’s dev update I mentioned open sourcing several of our Solidity libraries. Last week I worked on refactoring DigixCore 2.0 contracts to use those libraries from the npm modules.

This week I am working closely with the dev team and getting our new visiting full stack and Solidity developer familiarized with our codebase so that our growing development team can assist in finishing the remaining refactoring tasks.

Remaining Solidity Refactoring Tasks

The following components are going through a refactor and unit testing.

Product List Contract

ÐApp used to manage a list of recognized gold bars (i.e. LBMA approved products) that can be used to initiate a new DGX issuance process.

Proof of Asset Authorities Contracts

ÐApp that allows PoA authorities (Vendor, Transfer Authority, Custodian, and Auditor) to perform their tasks as part of the DGX issuance and redemption lifecycle.

Assets Explorer Contract

This allows users to view all assets in the Digix system including allowing users to list

Digix Admin Contract

Originally called Core Admin this contract is an internal facing ÐApp that allows Digix support to manage assets and perform tasks such as replacing assets that have failed an audit, adding additional documentation to assets, marketplace administration and configuration, as well as functions that allow us to initiate and manage the DGX issuance and redemption lifecycle.

Next week I am flying to the Philippines to work closely with our other Solidity and Truffle developers to get them up to speed on our codebase so they can begin assistance with the remaining refactoring and testing tasks stated above as well as having the right developer resources to start building our DAO governance prototype and after final approval being its development at full speed.

Chris Hitchcott (Core Developer)

Last week I wrote, tested and open sourced the Dijix suite, which covers the needs of Digix’s Proof of Asset system. Dijix is modular so can be expanded in the future, but for now it automates the data management of 3 main concepts:

• Proof of Asset Attestations
• PDFs
• Images

Dijix handles everything from the point of entry “i have this file i want to attest to” all the way to publishing to IPFS and returning an IPFS hash that represents a much richer version of that data that would otherwise be possible.

This week I wanted to outline a more visual overview of what the point of Dijix is:

Digix’s OLD Approach

Digix’s “DIJIX” Approach

New Approach

This systems means we can now store much richer data and upgrade the format of that data in future iterations in a more reliable standardized way. The example above is just the first version, but we could eventually implement any kind of data.

There are some particularly cool features of Dijix, including:

• Middleware hooks that allow us to transform data as it is processed (such as encrypting or decrypting or pinning to ipfs or even making ETH transactions)
• Isomorphism — the same code is used in node and the browser
• Full test suite in node and browser
• CLI Tool for batch processing
• Processing of images & PDFs for faster, less bandwidth usage for browsing PoA system
• Better viewing on mobile
• Futureproofing via plugin versioning system

Check out the github repo(s) for more implementation details. Or check out this video for thow the CLI works. It’ll be pretty much the same in browser or in node apps.

After completing this one-liner, we now have multiple IPFS objects uploaded and pinned, including the root PDF file itself, easily accessible metadata about the PDF, links to JPEG versions of each of the pages, and thumbnails for each of those pages:

The next task this week is to integrate react components for the fetching and rendering of this data and integration into the (pending) API for the new Proof of Asset system.