March 2019 Monthly Update

Published in

Po.et Blog

4 min readMar 31, 2019

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

March has proven to be our best month since November. We had to knock out that final 10% that was on our plates to wrap up our mainnet milestone and we got it all done. We’re setting ourselves up for a few other major wins coming in the second quarter of the year already and hopefully can maintain this pace.

The major highlights from March came in right here at the end of the month:

Releasing a completely rebuilt Works Explorer to make it easier than ever to start to test out Po.et. You can start to put content on the Po.et network without touching the API at all now.
Announced an updated Responsible Disclosures Policy along with our Bug Bounty Program. The Bug Bounty Program official starts on April 15th.
Open sourced Po.et API (f.k.a Frost API), our key custody solution for nodes to help make integrations much less painful
Had our first meetup of 2019 down in Austin during SXSW
Completed the Road to Mainnet Milestone (!!!)

Works Explorer

Works Explorer is going to be the home for more features geared towards the individual user, not someone that is planning on using Po.et super frequently. Right now, we’re leaving it free and open to everyone to use. We’ve built this as something that the community knows will always be around to show off their content, even if it gets removed from a publication or deleted from someone’s hard drive.

Some of our most frequently asked questions are about when to expect video/photo media to be able to be put onto Po.et. Technically, you can already do this if you’re a node operator, but we haven’t exposed the ability to do that with the API or Works Explorer. Well, that’s going to change in the next milestone! We’re going to slowly open it up to folks and looking at some options there on how to do the roll out.

Po.et API

As of March 29th, all of the software used to run Po.et is completely open source. The last piece of the puzzle was the key custody solution we created to help make life easier for those that are running nodes. Basically, this layer of software gives node operators the way to create custodial Bitcoin addresses and use those to sign the messages that are put on the Po.et network. We built this primarily as a user experience enhancement for the nodes, but we’ll keep evaluating where we take it from here. There’s a bunch of great work happening in the identity provider and decentralized identity space that we want to be mindful to work with. Currently, we’re not expecting any serious enhancements to the key custody side (outside of normal upkeep, security checks, etc.).

Responsible Disclosure and Bug Bounties

Our last part of the Road to Mainnet Milestone was opening up a public review process and bounty program. The Po.et Bug Bounty Program officially kicks off on April 15th, but we’ve already had a few researchers send in disclosures to help make sure all of the software is secure. Please double check that all of your submissions follow the responsible disclosure guidelines and are included in the scope of the policy.

As submissions start to come in, we’ll look for new ways to reward all of the submissions we receive. If you have ideas, please send them over to security@po.et.

Our Next Milestone

Finally, a new milestone is on the way.

I can’t imagine a crazier time in this entire market, full of ups and downs. Everyone who has worked with Po.et during this milestone has been an absolute trooper. I’ll speak for everyone in that we’re ready to move on to some new stuff.

Our next milestone is going to be just as important as the last one, but we’re currently in the process of scoping it down a little bit to make sure that we’re not doing 6+ month long major milestones. Internally, we deliver code much more rapidly, but I think it took too much mental energy to sustain as large of a goal as we had for this long. We’ll still see this cycle take a few months, but we’re aiming to limit it down to just one quarter long.

The week of April 1st is a big planning week as we continue to iterate on all of the ideas we’ve been collecting to make sure they fit together. We’ll publish the next milestones out right after we get all of that cleaned up. The quick headlines here are that we’re adding new types of relationships information can have with each other (huge for licensing), expanding the standard Po.et schemas, those API updates for binary files, and starting to integrate token incentives for building new content networks. There’s going to be other surprises in there that aren’t code related, but I’ll hold off on those until we make the official announcement.

Meetups

If you’re in town for Blockchain Week NYC, please give us a tweet, shout on Telegram, or email us at contact@po.et. We’d love to go on and sign you up to join us for our meetup. We’ll get started on the details here in the coming weeks. At SXSW, we had a small dinner and chatted about all things Po.et and blockchain. Our group was a mix of everyone from people just finding out about Po.et that week to experienced cryptographers. Don’t be a stranger!

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

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

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