Po.et and Echo Update — April 2020
What’s the latest on the Echo partnership?
Last fall, we announced our intention to partner with Echo to become our primary smart contract platform and allow for upgrading POE tokens into their native token. We made some great progress towards running Echo nodes, building on top of the new blockchain, and educating our community about Echo’s future. We also included a bonus period to help build momentum for the upgrade and raise additional awareness about Echo.
In February, public statements from the PixelPlex team introduced confusion about the technical details of how the upgrade from POE to ECHO would work through an intermediary “ePOE” token. Echo has the ability to bridge from an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token into a similar Echo-based smart contract whereby POE can be locked on Ethereum to be made available to use on Echo’s network. However, the announced plan was to upgrade POE into ECHO, not create a second asset and we did not want to deviate from that plan.
Since the confusion on the mechanics of the upgrade came up, the Po.et and Echo teams have been working to resolve the differences. As of today, we still do not have a solidified gameplan and have decided that it is in the best interest of everyone to reassess the terms of a partnership with Echo.
The Po.et team is in control of the upgrade contract and will begin sending back any POE sent to the contract this week. We have taken a snapshot of the contract with bonus amounts and will continue to honor the bonuses in the future Po.et network.
The POE will be sent back to the Ethereum address that you originally used in the upgrade contract. You will not be required to fill out any forms or need to give POE/ETH/BTC to someone to make the refund happen. We will not be sending the POE any alternative addresses than what you used previously.
What is the future of Po.et?
Po.et will keep moving forward with Echo, but it will look different than we thought.
The two teams believe that there is still a promising future by collaborating in the future. As of right now, the intention is to move forward with a Poet-powered network that launches based on the same open-source software as Echo but eventually begins to diverge and become specialized to Po.et, as a Layer 2 network for Bitcoin. The POE token will still be migrating away from Ethereum and upgrading into a new asset that lives on this new network. Even though the POE is being returned from the upgrade contract, the bonuses will still be honored on the new network.
Because the Po.et team intends to use the Echo software as the basis for the new smart contract layer, we’ve decided to pause all new development on Po.et until that network is ready to go to mainnet. We’ve been using the Ethereum network as our testnet for the most recent work on the roadmap, but are unsure on continuing compatibility since there is still work to be done to get the Echo software solid enough for a mainnet to operate. There’s an assumption that there will be feature parity with the Ethereum-based EVM, though, so not anticipating any major divergence.
Thank you to the builders
Also, today will be my last day as the project lead for Po.et. I’ve spent a little north of two years working on Po.et to build a better web and love what this team has built.
When I joined, we had a basic testnet without a solid protocol for structuring information. None of the publishers had heard of a blockchain and were unsure that we could find a way to build something scalable to the levels that the media industry required.
Today, the Po.et tech stack allows anyone to easily spin up the ability to interact with Bitcoin and IPFS protocols to create a very durable, censorship-resistant and scalable publishing/metadata network. We’ve built the initial parts of the next phases to enable curation and search abilities, but they’ll still need more development once the new network is live. I know that I’ll forever be looking for ways to incorporate Po.et’s work in other future projects.
The next step of Po.et will be working with the Echo team to bring our own chain to life and this will be coordinated by Tyler Evans, CTO at BTC Inc., Po.et’s parent company. Tyler has been involved in Po.et since its inception and been an advisor to the Echo leadership as well.
Po.et is constantly evolving and will continue to make forward progress as long as there’s a community that is interested in working together on the giant problems presented in the original Po.et whitepaper.
Keep moving forward one step at a time.
