“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost

The maturation process of building a protocol is an interesting challenge, especially when the protocol is focused on decentralization and tasked with the disruption of existing models. There’s a balance to strike between delivering product quickly while ensuring a stable foundation. And it’s not just about building what’s new, but also learning and leveraging the community of work that already exists. There’s a growing school of developers dedicated to building out concepts like the Semantic Web and Web of Trust that align with our mission. Po.et is about learning from the past to build for the future, and accounting for flexibility to adapt to the challenges given to us by an ever growing developer community. This is what maturity looks like in the decentralized web. It’s about building bridges, not moats at every step of the way.

How do we measure a protocol’s maturity? Measurement of maturity isn’t about applications built, but enablement of applications that could be built. It’s about measuring the behaviors over the results by opening the use of raw materials to enable others to build. This approach is driven by the admittance that we, as a company, don’t have all of the ideas nor want to limit the community by claiming we do. We are driven by rewarding an investment towards building the sandbox others want to play in. Maturation is making sure that the foundational constructs supporting the better web are prepared for an unlimited amount of creativity, activity and occupants.

Po.et is taking a huge step towards growing up. In human years, we’re almost 15 months old and in development years we’re approaching 95% completion to our largest milestone to date. The Road to Mainnet has been a journey towards learning, growing and positioning the future of the protocol and as we near this major milestone, we’re able to reflect on how we got here and where we’re going next.

Technically, we could have simply flipped a switch on the alpha product to start writing information to the Bitcoin mainnet months ago. But our expectations of Po.et as a protocol are more than just where the information lives. To us, moving to mainnet means that Po.et as a utility is open for all to use, participate upon and start enable everyone to begin to build real applications. We wanted to build an environment where creators can not just use existing applications, but have the materials and support to build their own. We wanted to build a protocol for creativity, a place where the next generation of the web will be constructed with a focus on interoperability, reputation and ownership. By providing these core values in our protocol, applications built using this technology will enable the ethos of the better web; whether that’s a marketplace, a wallet, the next social platform or the tools to enable a truly decentralized media economy.

We’re quickly approaching the day where we press “go” and turn on everything we’ve been working on. Throughout the next two weeks, there is a slew of new content coming out that explains more about the technical decisions we’ve made, new ways to explore content on the Po.et Network, and migration documentation for anyone using the API. In the remaining weeks of 2018, we’ll have a few more launches and announcements now that the foundation has been set.

At Po.et, we’re building a protocol to empower the next generation of builders and creators to construct the world they want to live in. We’re maturing together, and enabling a system that is ready to be influenced and constructed by those who support it. The current systems of operation are not meant for the future-thinking generations building the next wave of technologies and platforms. We want to return the power back to you.

This is the Po.et project.