We’re hard at work building the decentralized protocol for content ownership, discovery, and monetization in media.

It’s hard to believe that most of the engineering team was hired within the last 3 months. Everyone has been drinking from the firehose, learning about the market, ecosystem, and technology we’re building on top of. Here’s what we’ve been up to.

What Works Now?

The Po.et testnet is operational, and it has been hashing content claims since early 2017.

is operational, and it has been hashing content claims since early 2017. Attribution — timestamping a creative work to the testnet blockchain. Rights holders can irrefutably say, “I had possession of this content on this date.” That can provide valuable evidence in a legal dispute.

— timestamping a creative work to the testnet blockchain. Rights holders can irrefutably say, “I had possession of this content on this date.” That can provide valuable evidence in a legal dispute. An API rights holders can use to start timestamping their content on the blockchain.

rights holders can use to start timestamping their content on the blockchain. Integrations with the world’s most popular CMS tools, including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

with the world’s most popular CMS tools, including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Developer libraries for JavaScript, C#, Ruby, and PHP.

for JavaScript, C#, Ruby, and PHP. A mobile app (Poet Publisher) that lets you compose and register creative text on the Po.et network.

What’s really exciting is that several of the things just mentioned are community contributions, which underscores the open, decentralized nature of the Po.et ecosystem. Most of the developer libraries, integrations, and even the mobile app were community contributions.

Where Are We Going Next?

Our big push now is our migration from the Bitcoin testnet to the Bitcoin mainnet.

The primary components of that move are:

Claim batching to ramp up our scaling capabilities

to ramp up our scaling capabilities Fixing bugs

Security reviews

Automation of essential workflows

of essential workflows Protocol details for Bitcoin mainnet

for Bitcoin mainnet Better documentation of everything

We’ve made great progress on all these fronts. Initially, a lot of the work is in scope discovery: figuring out what needs to be done. Our engineering team has more than doubled in 3 months, which complicated our scope discovery efforts, because most of the members of the team have been absorbing all the details of the ecosystem we’re working in.

Learning from the existing team what’s already been implemented and what’s left to be done was a massive undertaking, and I’m proud to report that our team has done tremendously well at coordinating and knowledge sharing.

We’ve crossed the first major hurdle in the mainnet effort: transitioning from scope discovery to implementation mode. At this stage, the to-do list stops growing and starts shrinking. You can see that in our mainnet milestone burn-down chart:

Once we get to mainnet, we’ll go through some test cycles hashing to the real blockchain, and when we’re satisfied that everything’s working as expected, we’ll be in a much better position to accomplish more of our goals:

Expand capabilities and release new features

Take on new media partners

Enable license transactions

Enable production content marketplaces

Grow the Po.et network

We’re excited to be on this journey with you.