KnownOrigin Dev Update — Jan 2019
⚡⚡Platform improvements to enable handling much larger numbers of artists and artworks ⚡⚡
It’s been a long time coming but we have put significant effort into upgrading the underlying platform architecturally to scale and offer frictionless experience.
Over the last few months we have seen several issues arise from the way the application was original built. We knew that in order to grow and to reach the goal of self service oriented platform this needed to be fixed before anything else. There is no point adding more of the good stuff if you can’t handle the increase in demand.
Today we have rolled out a new and improved KnownOrigin dApp, you should not notice to many things aesthetically different but the underlying platform architecture has changed dramatically. I wanted to give an overview of the changes and the reasoning behind it:
EventWatcher
We have reworked our existing event watching tool which is responsible for listening to our contracts and reacting to them.
Currently this drives things like the Activity page, the Feed, as well as the newly introduced telegram alerts channel. We have also added to this the ability to show USD prices and dates.
TransactionListener
We have introduced a new application into our platform which is a TransactionListener, this provides more fine grain controls and triggers when things happen on KO smart contracts.
Telegram Bot
Our first foray into Telegram with an alerts channel & bot, this is an enhancement to push non-intrusive updates to those who are interested about what’s going on with the platform.
Public APIs
We have always believed in open source tooling and all of our code and contracts are open source and verified on Etherscan. In addition to this we will now start to offer API access to the KO platform. Starting off with simple things like looking digital asset data, artist’s collection, trending and likes. All this information is freely available but exposing via a traditional API allows greater flexibility for consumers.
Infura?
Over the past few months we have had several reports of issues loading the site, therefore, we are attempting to decrease our reliance on 3rd party hosted tools. With the enhancements mentioned above and the new APIs we have now delivering 75% of the site’s pages without interaction with Web3/Infura. This such offer a more consistent end-user experience all round.
What’s next?
Now we are much more confident the application can scale to larger volumes of users, artists and artworks we will now shift focus to new features driven by user research and feedback.
Some insight into the things we are thinking about:
- Self service submission— this has been asked for and spoken about lot. We have already done some research into how this may work. We will now start solidifying the match towards this goal over the coming weeks and months.
- Stable coins — we have been speaking to KyberNetwork the last few weeks and they have provided some good insight into how this would work to allow purchases in things such as DAI. Stable coins are a hot topic at the moment and we will look to integrate one or more in the future.
- Improved Search — we already have some ideas on simple filters and searching which needs to be added. This will become increasingly important as more content get listed.
- Better ways to communicate between buyers and sellers — I’d like to do this in a decentralised way making it part of the artwork. More research is needed but its not an unsolvable problem.
- Explore possible integrations of a decentralised identity/user profile service such as uPort — we are not set on this but I feel giving users the choice on this may help personalise the experience.
We work on KnownOrigin not for money but because it’s fun and we love it. We are passionate about it success and as it provides good challenges and invaluable learnings for us. ❤️
We’ve learned so much about tech, the community, art and ourselves and as we approach the first anniversary of the go live of the alpha: April 2018. We are proud of the progress we have made and recognise our mistakes. We are constantly impressed with the work and projects in the NFT space and as it matures we hope to be part of it.
Start your digital art collection now! dapp.knownorigin.io
Come say “hello” on our telegram channel or twitter @knownorigin_io
Big love — KO Team
🎨 BE ORIGINAL. BUY ORIGINAL.
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