In the United States, the new year is marked by a celebration which sees fireworks and champagne take over every city. An estimated 1 million people gather in Times Square to watch the “ball drop”, as they have since 1907 (21,000 head over to Madison Square Garden to see the band Phish), and the rest of the nation tunes into this event on live television. The New Year marks a time of renewal; of starting over — but it’s also an opportunity for everyone to look back on the events of the past 12 months. Here at Po.et, we have much to celebrate and it’s incredible to think about all that we have managed to achieve in 2018.

At Po.et, we are committed to building a bridge to a better web, where reputation, attribution, and interoperability are at the heart of everything we do. This year, we took a major step toward realizing our mission, as we moved from testnet to Bitcoin mainnet, a move that signifies the protocol’s technical and conceptual maturity. The migration was covered in Bitcoin Magazine and on Nasdaq, and we put out lots of great content around this release: A breakdown of the protocol’s stages, a piece detailing the nuts and bolts of Po.et’s technical architecture, a glossary of terms for newbies and veterans alike to reference, and, of course, a new migration guide with updated technical documentation.

The move to mainnet signals that Po.et is open for all to use. We want to build something that is as accessible as possible for everyone in the world; something that will eventually bring increased value to content across the web. We know the community has placed a lot of trust and faith in everything we are building and we’re so proud of how seamlessly our team really came together to reach this milestone.

It’s a great testament to our mission and everything we are building that we were finally able to secure a monumental partnership with New York Media. In early 2019, Po.et will be integrating with New York Media’s Clay Publishing Platform, which powers Slate.com, Golf.com, and Radio.com, among many others. Clay was a perfect match for what we are building at Po.et. It’s an open-source content management system built with adaptability in mind and has a component-based architecture that supports modern publishers’ needs for custom content, e-commerce, and distribution strategies. Both teams from Po.et and New York Media are dedicated to contributing to building future-looking technologies for all publishers. The combination of two open source platforms working together exemplifies the power of transparent, collaborative software and we couldn’t be more excited to see what the future holds for this partnership.

Partnerships are only one of the ways we are spreading the word about Po.et all across the globe. Since I joined the company as CEO in February, I have made it my mission to elevate the project’s visibility in a huge way, speaking on panels at AdWeek Elevate, RightsTechSummit, the Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai, INFORM Sydney, WAN-IFRA in Lisbon, Columbia Univeristy’s Journalism School in New York, Carnagie Mellon’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, and Distributed 2018, to name a few. I even had a fun interview down under by SkyNews Australia about Po.et and the potential it has to influence the future of journalism and media.

I wasn’t the only one on the road this year, though. Our Head of Product, David Turner, was also spreading Po.et across the globe. From representing our engineering and product teams at DevCon in Prague to moderating one of the first panels about Token Curated Registries at Distributed to explaining how blockchain can revolutionize journalism at the Online News Association’s ONA18 in Austin.

Po.et’s message has spread far and wide in the media in 2018. Earlier this year, I sat down with Alexa Christon and Laura Correnti at Adlandia to talk blockchain, what it means for media, what it will change (and won’t), and how Italian food is better in New Jersey than New York. Po.et was also featured in AdWeek, Adage, Breaker Magazine (twice), Columbia Journalism Review, Digital Content Next, Hackernoon, Business Insider, Token Daily, TechRepublic, and Distributed Dialogues, and numerous other great publications. There’s seriously so many, we couldn’t possibly list them all.

Of course, everything we do, we couldn’t do without you, our incredible community. We’ve been floored by the passion and dedication I’ve seen around the world from people just as excited about Po.et as we are. In the last year, we’ve added over 25,000 people to our Twitter community and 5,000 Telegram. This online enthusiasm has translated offline as well: From a standing room only meet up in Shanghai, to all the wonderful photos of our members repping Po.et merch in all corners of the world, we are so grateful to each and every one of you for evangelizing the work we are doing in your local communities.

But you guys haven’t just helped us in terms of brand awareness, you’ve also been busy creating real-life use cases and applications for Po.et. A few of our favorites this year include this 11 year old who became one of the 1st of her generation to timestamp her blog to the blockchain using our WordPress plugin and Bryan Isbells’ Alexa command which stamps anything on the protocol. We love seeing Po.et in action and can’t wait to see what the community comes up with next!

I mentioned this in last week’s Telegram update, but it bears repeating here: Looking back on everything we’ve all come together to achieve is great, but it’s even more exciting to look forward to the future. If you’re looking for us on the road in 2019, you’ll find us at DCN in January and at SXSW in March. We’ll also be working hard to keep the momentum we built this year. Now that we have all the paramount pieces in place, it’s time to begin scaling Po.et and focusing heavily on getting more contributors and community products built on our protocol. In fact, we made some really specific development choices to ensure that we scale in a thoughtful way.

Thank you so much for coming along with us on this journey. We’re excited to continue shaping the future of journalism, media, and the web at large. Here’s to 2019 and the road ahead. Go POE!