Moving past the Beta
Codex Viewer Beta will be shutting down on October 15th in favor of our Rinkeby Testnet environment.
Several months ago, we launched the Codex Viewer Beta on the Rinkeby Testnet. The beta was designed to get early feedback on the viewer itself, but more importantly help uncover any issues with our smart contracts.
Since then, our smart contracts have gone through a lot of changes. They’ve had a full security audit from Hosho, we’ve held an open bug bounty, and finally the resulting contracts have been deployed to Mainnet. These days, more users are using the Codex Viewer Mainnet than the Codex Viewer Beta, and the number of transactions there will soon surpass total number of transactions from the beta.
New Testnet environments
Now that Mainnet is live and battle-tested, we’ll be deprecating our beta environment which still uses the old smart contracts in favor of deploying the fully audited contract code to the Ropsten and Rinkeby Testnets. Our team will use these environments as a way to test new product functionality before pushing changes up to Mainnet. Additionally, these environments will continue to be open to anyone to try Codex without spending any ETH.
The Ropsten Testnet is already available at https://ropsten.codex-viewer. Rinkeby will become available only after the Beta has been completely shut down, and will be at https://rinkeby.codex-viewer.com. Please note that these should only ever be used as testing environments only — they will get regularly wiped and redeployed as we make changes to our product. Mainnet is the only environment that should be used as a tool to manage assets long term.
What this means for you
If you’re still actively using the beta to manage your assets, we strongly encourage you to re-create those assets on Mainnet. After October 15th, any tokens you created on the beta smart contracts will continue to exist on the Rinkeby Ethereum blockchain but the beta version of Codex Viewer that you may be using to view/manage these tokens will no longer be supported.
The Codex Beta Gallery will also disappear after the 15th. Be sure to check out all of the great art that participants submitted during Codex Quests before it’s turned off!
We’ve had a few users ask about migrating assets from Codex Viewer Beta to Mainnet. Unfortunately, there’s no automated way of doing this today. If you want to bring any Codex Records over from beta to Mainnet, you’ll have to re-create them manually by copying the metadata over from the previously created records. Due to the nature of how the blockchain works, the digital provenance (i.e., when the Codex Record was created and by who) won’t be preserved since any records copied over this way will be brand new ERC-721 tokens.
What next?
If you take a look at the Testnet environments today you may notice some exciting changes from what is currently deployed to Mainnet. I’m not going to share the details here, but once development & testing of those new features is being finalized we’ll share some more details about what to expect when they’re released to Mainnet.
As always, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me directly at john@codexprotocol.com.
