It’s been an exciting time for Po.et since we completed our successful token raise on August 8th, 2017. Unfortunately, we had to spend more time on customer support than we had originally planned. Combing through the post-sale support tickets took about 3 weeks and helping token sale participants claim their tokens took another couple of weeks.

We were finally free to focus on accelerating the development of the Po.et platform at the start of this month. Our team has been working tirelessly to both onboard digital publishers to our alpha partner program and to clean up some of the technical debt that existed prior us open-sourcing the project. The focus for the remainder of Q3 and Q4 will be on updating the platform’s backend, building out integrations for the most popular CMS platforms, and on-boarding publishers with large content catalogs.

We’re happy to start our development update series as we want to be as transparent with our community as possible. We will be providing frequent updates for our community here on our official blog. If you’d like to follow along with each update on a more granular level, we welcome all interested parties to join us on GitHub.

A Brief History of Po.et

Po.et was an idea conceptualized in October 2016 by BTC Media as a response to the problems they faced when trying to publish Bitcoin Magazine and Distributed articles in a timely manner. We iterated on a previous idea, Proof of Existence, and felt confident that we should expand the underlying tech to encompass a wide array of media types including written text, audio, and images. We believed that a universal asset registry would be an extremely disruptive force within the digital media industry.

A small team of developers gathered in Argentina during January 2017 to build out a PoC for the Po.et platform. We travelled to Colombia for a month to focus entirely on the project, distraction-free, write a lot of code and drink lots of coffee. By the end of February, we had a working PoC we could experiment with. While we were happy with our progress, we knew that in order to have a production-grade product, we needed:

A developer-friendly deployment pipeline

Configurable Parameters

Testing/Staging Environments

Automated Tests

A Logging Solution like ELK Stack

Load Balancing

Auto-Scaling

Fail-Safe mechanisms

We were still implementing many of these solutions up until our token sale. In order to be as transparent as possible with our community, we open-sourced our codebase before the sale even though there was still a lot of technical debt to clean. Since then, we have been working on improving the quality of the code and infrastructure in general.

Updates

We’ve been adapting the entire codebase so it can be configured via configuration files. We’re nearly finished with this process. Once it’s done, it will allow us to more efficiently create testing, staging, and production environments. This will also make it much easier for our community members to spin up their own Po.et node. Users will be able to run nodes on both our mainnet (POET prefix) and our testnet (BARD prexif).

We’ve increased the reliability of the timestamping technology being used in our alpha partner program. Previously, in the case of some error during the timestamping process, files would show up with a “unknown certification date” message. The creative work was still searchable on the platform, but did not exist on the Bitcoin Blockchain. We have recently adapted both the Po.et Feeds and Node to fail when this error occurs so the network is notified of the issue and can take steps to fix it. We also made a small change to the Torrent system so nodes can better connect to it.

Po.et is moving to a new production environment at https://app.po.et/. Unlike our current alpha environment, our new environment is built using terraform, which will serve as a much needed infrastructure upgrade. We’ll release the terraform files to our community in the future as an alternative to running a Po.et node using docker.

We’ve also started working on Po.et Node Scripts, which will help us better test and develop the platform. It currently offers scan-tx and scan-block, which will display whether a bitcoin transaction or block contains Po.et data, and if so, with what prefix, version, and infoHash.

Hiring

Walter Zalazar just joined the Po.et team to work on the code and infrastructure of the Po.et node. He comes to the table with excellent ReactJS knowledge that will help make the frontend more robust.

If you’re a NodeJS developer and interested in working for/with Po.et, reach out to us at contact [at] po.et.

Shoutout

The Po.et team would also like to give a big shoutout to one of our community members, Sergio Garcia, for starting to work on a Po.et Drupal module. Developers can explore the codebase on GitHub.

What’s Next