April 2019 Monthly Update

Published in

Po.et Blog

4 min readMay 1, 2019

Po.et is building the better web: the decentralized protocol suite for content attribution, discovery, monetization and reputation.

April has been a much more smooth, calm month as opposed to the flurry of developments that March brought us. We’ve taken the time to sit back and work through the first parts of our “Connecting the Dots” milestone that we announced two weeks ago (and rest a little bit, too).

Connecting the Dots

The first phase of the milestone focuses on expanding some of the core functionalities of Po.et that exist, but we’ve not exposed via the Works Explorer or API from poetnetwork.net. Our most requested feature to implement has been the ability to use non-text file types like audio, video, and PDFs. We’re going to be adding those features and making that functionality available to people who connect a wallet that can prove ownership of POE tokens.

The primary goal for “Proof of POE” is to reward token holders with additional features from poetnetwork.net applications. This will not affect any other services that use Po.et, like the Poet Publisher from Bryan Isbell. Also, this is not meant to be a long term strategy to drive adoption as the core team doesn’t want to be the main source of application development in the future.

In order to get ready for this work plus some of the additional functionalities that come right after, we’ve taken April to refactor some of the code in frost-api. The largest part of that refactor comes down to how we’re creating UUIDs, but it shouldn’t affect any end users at this point.

Responsible Disclosures & Bug Bounty Program

Since we opened up the bug bounty program on April 15th, we’ve had 11 disclosures submitted. We’re still working out some of the kinks in how we evaluate submissions but pleased with the general quality of the submissions.

If you’re looking to submit a disclosure, I would highly stress that you ensure your submission is in scope and pertain to the specific projects we’ve listed in our security documentation. Also, Elliot published an article talking about some best practices on disclosures and gives more insight into what we’re expecting.

One of the things we didn’t have set up for kickoff was a leaderboard or similar functionality. We’re exploring what else we can do to continue to attract high-quality submissions.

Wordpress & Outreach

Back in the February update, I talked about working on finding new ways to target Wordpress sites with over 100k unique visitors per month. We’ll be bringing Po.et on a roadshow in the fall, right as this milestone comes to an end. As of right now, we’ll be attending Pressnomics6 in September and WordCamp US 2019 in November to start getting more facetime with Wordpress developers.

If you’re using Wordpress to support a medium to larger scale publisher, please drop us a note as we’d love to work with you.

Development Labs

In conjunction with this milestone, we have a few non-technical key results we’re looking to achieve, specifically around getting more developers involved via the Po.et Development Labs. When we started this program last summer, the market was hot and everyone was excited to be working on blockchain projects. Throughout the fall, we continued to see momentum slow down for projects we were talking to, mostly citing financial issues.

Fast forward to present day and you’ll see that life is coming back to the ecosystem and new developers are starting to get engaged again. We want to take advantage of this resurgence and want to bring back urgency to getting in more teams into Development Labs.

In the past, we tried to focus on more mature, not at the absolute ground floor projects. Moving forward, we’re going to be here with open arms to anyone looking to build with Po.et and make sure that they have the right access and resources available to do so. If you’ve had an idea that you’ve been waiting to start coding up, send us an email and let’s talk about it!

Meeting up with Po.et

On May 15th, we’ll be having a Po.et meetup in the evening, similar to how we did the one in Austin during SXSW. There will be a few of us in town that weekend and looking forward to meeting you. Still working on location, but aiming for somewhere right north of Penn Station. We’re also exploring options for having a Po.et breakfast for those that want to start their Blockchain Week days with a little bite to eat.

On June 25th, we’ll be in San Francisco for Bitcoin 2019, put on by our founding organization BTC Inc. Tons of great speakers lined up already and meant to be a very accessible, affordable conference. No set date for the Po.et meetup yet as we’re still looking for a great venue to hold 25–30 folks. If you have a suggestion, please come find me in Telegram.

April flew by but gave us time to really focus on the next few months of development. It also marks my one year anniversary with Po.et and it’s amazing to think of how far we’ve come. It hasn’t been the most picturesque journey, but I’m incredibly thankful that you’re here reading this post.

Join us on Telegram! https://t.me/poetofficial

Visit our Website! https://po.et/

Check out our GitHub! https://github.com/poetapp