The Po.et Story
How, Why and Where Po.et Was Born
Po.et is like ballpoint pens and the printing press: it was born out of a deliberate effort to overhaul a slow, manual process that affected lots of people.
Just as ballpoint pens made it much easier to write by hand without worrying about ink drying out, and the printing press allowed written materials to be mass produced without requiring legions of manual laborers, so does Po.et’s distributed ledger enable individuals and organizations to publish, share and redistribute digital media in a fully automated and secure way.
This article discusses the history of Po.et, including where the project originated, how it has evolved and its current and future plans.
Po.et’s Birth at BTC Media
Po.et traces its origins to BTC Media, a publishing and marketing firm that focuses on the blockchain space. BTC Media engages routinely with companies that are using blockchain technology to innovate in a range of industries, from trade and finance to real estate and property management.
As BTC Media co-founder Tyler Evans explained, that engagement gave the company perspective on how the blockchain could address pain points within BTC Media’s own industry, digital media.
From BTC Media’s perspective, the main pain points in digital media center on the way content ownership and redistribution rights are managed. “The traditional process is very labor-intensive,” Evans said. “It requires emails and lawyers looking at things — all just to share a piece of content that took a journalist a couple of hours to create.”
He added, “Those issues arise from not having a single source of truth about licensing information for an article.”
Po.et was conceived as a solution to these challenges. By building a distributed ledger to record ownership information for digital media assets, Po.et allows content owners and publishers to interact in an automated, secure way. Content can be bought and sold, or syndicated, through the blockchain without the tedious, risk-prone processes that have traditionally been required when negotiating digital content distribution.
Po.et’s Launch
After working through iterations of the Po.et distributed ledger concept in order to hone their development plan, the BTC Media team decided to spin Po.et off as a distinct project.
The project kicked off in December 2016. Po.et secured seed funding the same month.
The Po.et development team began work in early 2017 and released their first Minimum Viable Product (MVP) the following June, demonstrating that the Po.et concept could be applied in practice to solve real problems in the digital media industry. The next month, Po.et announced partnerships with several digital media companies, including Coin Speaker, The Merkle and Crypto Insider.
In August 2017, Po.et ran its token sale, which raised $10M over the course of a few hours.
In addition, Po.et’s backers created the Po.et Foundation in order to oversee the project and manage its technical and conceptual direction.
Po.et Today
Currently, Po.et has a full-time development team that consists of three programmers, whose main focus for the time being is on continuing to build out and vet the alpha release of the Po.et software platform. They are also working on new features and tools, such as a WordPress plugin that will make it very simple to manage content over the Po.et distributed ledger directly from WordPress.
Po.et is also in the process of growing by hiring more developers, as well as building media and business development teams in order to increase its market presence.
Conclusion
Although Po.et is barely a year old, it has evolved rapidly from both technical and conceptual perspectives. Its software is being used to streamline content ownership within the digital media space, and the Po.et team’s ambitions remain broad. The WordPress plugin in particular promises significant disruption to the way content on the world’s most popular CMS is managed. The Po.et team expects that, going forward, the platform will be used not only for written content, but also for rich media like videos, audio and more — all of which can be distributed with significantly less effort and risk using a decentralized ledger.
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