June 2019 Monthly Update

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

June gave us the largest boost of progress towards our milestones that we’ve had all year. We were able to get “proof of POE” launched to give advanced features for POE token holders like the ability to upload non-text content. I’m thrilled because it shows off the true simplicity and power of what we’re doing at the protocol level. For more information on how to get your Po.et account ready for non-text content, read our announcement at https://blog.po.et/announcing-support-for-new-file-types-5e53460e2dea.

We also snuck in some of the updated schema options (our 3rd item on the current roadmap) that allow for even more expressiveness about the content you’re using with Po.et. You can now upload information about copyrights, related works, and other general pieces of metadata. As we progress, there will be more ways for this data to be used, so please check those out! We’re going to continue to add in a few more new options before we make a blog post announcement about the new functionality.

Next up on the roadmap includes new claim types to help build more explicit relationships between claims and content and interface updates. With regards to the interface updates on poetnetwork.net, we’re restructuring everything right now, so we’re not taking the time to invest in “look and feel” until we get closer to the end of the milestone as we’d have to remodel it anyways to allow for the new functionalities.

Po.et Website Issues

We had two incidents this month where our informational website was not accessible due to issues with Ethiopia’s domain register. We’ve had this issue once before in 2017, but it lasted for just a handful of hours. However, in the most recent event, we experienced multiple days of downtime and this is not acceptable.

After the first time this happened, we sat down as a team to talk through the potential options and decided to not take any action. The hours of downtime still kept us well above 99.9% availability which is completely acceptable for us.

We also have talked about rebranding Po.et to separate out the “bitcoin focused” parts from the “POE focused” parts. It’s been a long-standing issue that people coming to Po.et for the first time don’t understand how everything ties together and where the token fits into the long-term strategy.

So, we’re going to add in a new item to the Connecting the Dots roadmap that is meant to address some of the basic concepts of Po.et and ensure that our naming of products/protocols/applications is more clear. We’ll make it the 3rd phase and potentially break it into a few different pieces. I’m still thinking through the best approach, but I wanted to make a public commitment to doing better here. I’d love to hear your feedback in Telegram on how to move forward.

Meeting up with Po.et

We just got back from San Francisco and helping out the BTC Inc. family by lending a hand at Bitcoin 2019. We had an absolutely amazing time and had a chance to talk to hundreds of people about Po.et. We came back exhausted bodies, but refreshed minds on the importance of what we’re working on.

We don’t have any events right around the horizon scheduled for July, but we’ll start back up again in August with the Wordpress community at Pressnomics in Tuscon. We’re also potentially attending the Reboot Web of Trust workshop series in Prague, but nothing confirmed yet.

I can’t believe July is here. We’ve accomplished so much in the first half of this year, especially considering we’re a lean team. The trick will be for us to find new ways to expand our contributors in this second half, especially to work on Phase 2 for the new contracts we’ll need for the incentivized curation markets.

I know many folks come to Po.et for trading, but then end up finding a technology that actually could change the world. It’s an exciting time to be involved in this revolution and I appreciate you sticking around. We’re here for the long haul and can’t wait to see what you’ll end up building with Po.et.