Today we’re publishing the Po.et core team’s next group of features and next milestone we’re calling, “Connecting the Dots”.

Up until now, we’ve been primarily focused on the basic mechanics of creating the protocol and tools to make Proof of Existence accessible and scalable. Proof of Existence is a simple technique where we can create a transaction on a secure blockchain which contains an immutable reference to a piece of information and generate a verifiable timestamp in order to be able to later verify that information existed at a certain time. In November, we reached the point where we felt the maturity of Po.et allowed us to start writing these transactions to the Bitcoin mainnet.

This basic foundation can power incredibly powerful systems where we can use blockchains to help coordinate information in a permissionless way. All great systems start with seemingly basic foundations and Po.et is no different.

For Po.et, we’ve decided that we want to use Proof of Existence to help us build a better web where the virtues of trust, verifiability, and accountability are core to the protocols we rely on. The protocol structures all of the information as “claims” which are cryptographically signed messages that contain metadata about a specific piece of data and adhere to a specific format and rules. The reason we call them claims comes from the fact that anyone can use Po.et to claim anything about a piece of content that they want; we do not consider any of the raw information put on the Po.et network to be considered truthful or accurate. Each cryptographic signature is currently generated from an identity that you get from a Po.et node, most likely coming from the applications hosted on poetnetwork.net.

For the next iteration of Po.et, we need to take what we’ve done up until now and expand from the basic concepts to create more complex relationships. By the end of this milestone, we’re focusing on adding four new pieces of general functionality:

Allow for all types of content, not just text

Expand the vocabulary of metadata that we can use in the protocol

Create additional ways to connect claims to each other

Provide a way to create an incentivized content network using the POE token

Let’s dive into more specifics about what we’re building in this milestone in order to reach those goals.

Supporting binary files through the Works Explorer and API

Our most requested (and most needed) feature has been supporting videos, photos, PDFs, and other non-text file types. We’ll enable that functionality through the API and Works Explorer interfaces. We’re going to roll this out over time to make sure all of our servers can keep up with the potential load.

Verifying your POE wallet to unlock new features on poetnetwork.net

We want to make sure we’re rewarding POE token owners with some additional functionalities for applications that the core team is creating. To start, we’ll be allowing verified accounts to have higher rate limits and fewer restrictions on poetnetwork.net applications. For instance, we’ll give verified accounts the ability to upload larger files.

If you’re wanting to have no restrictions at all, you can run your own node and we’d love to help you set that up.

Expanding Po.et’s metadata vocabulary

We’ve decided to use schema.org and Dublin Core Metadata Initiative as the core source for all of the ways to describe information about your content. Up until now, we’ve only included a very limited default vocabulary. Also, we’re exposing the ability to more easily create custom attributes for your content to help incentivize specialized communities to adopt Po.et as their protocol of choice. This will be helpful in industries outside of publishing/media, like supply chain management.

Connecting claims together to create more expressive relationships

We’re adding in new claim types that can connect multiple claims together. For instance, licensing can be implemented via claims that connect the content together with a specific license document. We can also use this for flagging invalid claims about the content on the network so that we can all being to establish who is recording truthful information. This will enable an entirely new class of applications, like marketplaces, to use Po.et.

Enabling communities to curate the content that lives on Po.et

Everything we will have built up until this point is all to enable the next layer of Po.et: incentivized curation networks. We’ve been experimenting with a few models over the past months and talking with early partners about how they want to use Po.et to be more than just a way to record claims and put those claims into action. Each content network will be powered by the POE token and use content and claims from the Po.et network. By far, this is our most important step of this milestone and will help to connect the dots on where the future of Po.et is heading.