We know that content creators around the world are struggling with attribution, discovery, and monetization. And we know that the better web should be built with trust, verifiability, and accountability as primary goals, not afterthoughts.

We believe that distributed ledgers will be critical to the success of this better web and that bitcoin has a significant lead to becoming the de facto standard currency for digital economies.

But, most importantly, we believe that Po.et is uniquely positioned to build open-source publishing technologies that rely on the protocols of the better web and tie Po.et more closely to the emerging future of Bitcoin.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve formed a partnership with Echo, a new blockchain application development platform and network which enables smart contract functionalities with bitcoin as its native currency. Through this partnership, Echo will become our primary smart contract platform for the future development of Po.et’s applications, transitioning away from our plans with Ethereum.

In doing so, the Echo team has agreed to allow the upgrade of POE tokens into its native ECHO tokens to help bootstrap its new network. The Po.et Foundation will be rebranding the core protocols we’ve built to date in order to expand Po.et as a standalone organization focused on open-source, decentralized publishing tools.

Our Journey

In 2016, the founding Po.et team set out to build a “shared, open, universal ledger designed to record metadata and ownership information for digital creative assets.” Since then, we have made amazing progress toward that original vision and the Po.et protocols and software have matured by leaps and bounds.

In fact, we’ve:

Built multiple versions of the core protocol that allow for massive scaling

Delivered an API-driven custodial Bitcoin wallet (originally named Frost)

Integrated with multiple popular CMSs

Given back to other open-source software projects, including Bitcoin

Funded the Development Labs to support like-minded contributors

However, we’ve struggled with one major part of our original vision: our token.

The vision for the token has changed a few times since the white paper was released in 2017. The founding team was excited about the prospect of using the POE token as a unique way to incentivize the growth and usage of the Po.et protocols, including using POE as the native payment system for the network.

Po.et was a simple proof of concept at that point, but the team was ready to run. First, Po.et needed significant work to get its underlying anchoring mechanics stable and scalable. We knew we could build a new solution for batching transactions that relied on Bitcoin since it had proven to be reliable for quite some time. Second, smart contracts on Ethereum around concepts such as curation markets and prediction markets were very young, so we decided to be actively experimenting, but not committing to anything too early. In November 2018, we shipped the updated core protocol and began using the Bitcoin mainnet on our poetnetwork.net applications.

Fast forward to today and the Po.et protocols and software up to this point have still not relied on our token heavily. We’ve explored multiple different ways to utilize the POE token, but we always come back to the question: “Why can’t this be done with bitcoin, or does it have to be POE?” Po.et’s mission is to build the open ledger for metadata and that requires us to think hard about why we’re introducing new mechanics into the systems we’re designing.

With the “Connecting the Dots” roadmap we introduced this spring, we decided to take a step toward introducing some basic utility in our applications with the requirement that our token would be used to unlock additional features in order to run an experiment. We knew that getting people through the process of learning about Po.et, getting POE tokens and tying them to their poetnetwork.net account would be an uphill battle, but wanted to see that struggle first hand instead of hypothesizing about ways to solve a problem that we weren’t facing in practice. We also began reaching out to Solidity development teams to work on Phase 2 of our roadmap, which included our incentivized curation markets.

After implementing the “proof of POE” functionality, it became clear that the multiple layers of cryptocurrencies were making it more difficult to execute our mission than it needed to be. At the same time, we had also received pushback from many of our potential enterprise-level adopters about the additional complexity that the token introduced for their accounting and legal teams. Most importantly, we want to deliver real value back to the community, not develop overly complex or confusing products.

Meet Echo

We began reaching out to outside development teams to build the incentivized curation markets in late spring of 2019. One of the teams that came up in our exploration was PixelPlex, a development team that has incredible experience from working on numerous blockchain projects. Originally, we wanted to explore the possibility of using it to build out our smart contracts but realized there could be some more exciting opportunities available to us.

PixelPlex began developing smart contract protocols in 2014, working on BitShares to develop the first delegated proof-of-stake blockchain. It has spent over 50,000 man-hours with 38 full-time developers to build Echo. Its platform supports Solidity, the programming language used on Ethereum, plus additional functionalities that allow traditional programming languages such as C++, Python and Go to be used. Echo has a native token, ECHO, that secures its network through a proof-of-stake-style consensus mechanism that includes a verifiable random function to choose block producers and verifiers, in a similar way to Algorand, and has some very interesting properties that allow for decentralization where other Bitcoin sidechains have relied on using federated consensus mechanisms.

Echo has already developed multiple wallets, a block explorer and browser extensions. Its testnet is currently running and it will be announcing its mainnet release soon. You can read its documentation at https://docs.echo.org/.

For us, we’ve long wanted to be able to use Bitcoin to power smart contracts. After all, Po.et was a project that originated out of BTC Inc, the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine, and we all love Bitcoin. Po.et’s goal has always been to integrate with Bitcoin and leverage the network for new use cases. When coupled with the ability to leverage all of the developer tools from Solidity, we became very excited at the prospect of using Echo for Po.et’s applications.

We’ve gotten to know the PixelPlex team through Po.et’s founding company, BTC Inc. Tyler Evans, BTC’s CTO, has advised Echo over the past year. BTC is also a strategic partner and investor in the Echo project. Members from the Po.et team do not work on Echo directly and BTC Inc is not directly operating Echo.

Po.et’s Next Steps

Po.et will be changing its shape as part of this partnership with Echo. Moving forward, the Po.et Foundation will be focused on building out open-source decentralized media applications and delegating its current ownership/responsibility for the development of current Po.et protocols to the community.

The plan is to rebrand the core protocols and software as “Linked Claims.” We believe that everything we’ve done to this point absolutely needs to continue on, but we want to transition to a less hands-on role. We will do this transition gradually over the rest of 2019. Until then, we have plenty of enhancements we’re adding into the protocol, including the ability to use multiple blockchains for anchoring and registering content to enhance the decentralization of the Linked Claims protocol. Of course, compatibility with Echo will be an incredibly important addition to get working quickly.

The Po.et Foundation has spent its resources to build out the protocol and has generally avoided application development as much as possible. However, through our partnership with Echo, the Foundation can become more active in the development of applications using the Linked Claims protocol and Echo. The main focus of the Foundation will become the Development Labs, which has been our preferred way to engage with any projects that are built on top of Po.et. We’ve already begun prototyping a decentralized community news network and hope to find enterprise support for it soon. Each of the Development Labs projects will be required to leverage the Linked Claims protocol and Echo and be released as open-source software. The Development Labs will not be pursuing the development of closed-source commercial applications.

The Po.et Foundation is planning to upgrade its tokens to ECHO and to participate in securing the Echo network. We’ll be releasing more information over the next several weeks about the mechanics of this upgrade and how the Po.et community can participate at the ground floor in the launch of the Echo network. We’re excited for this opportunity to be a foundational piece in launching this ambitious project that can be the infrastructure not only for Po.et, but for thousands of other applications that can now interoperate with Bitcoin.

Our social media channels will be supported to ensure that everyone is aware of their options to upgrade their POE tokens. Telegram is the preferred way to engage with questions about Po.et and we’ll point Echo discussions to its channels.

We’re currently working with the Echo team to set up AMAs, release the token upgrade contract and spread the word about our partnership. Echo is extremely interesting to any developer that wants to use their Solidity code but pay in bitcoin.

To learn more about Echo, visit https://echo.org and check out its first blog post “Introducing Echo.” In that post, you can find links to its GitHub repos, helpful tips for running a node and learn about how to get involved with its Discord and Telegram communities.

I’m thrilled to announce this partnership as it helps solidify our path toward a better web built with reputation, privacy, and trust. I have high hopes for Echo and am excited to support its efforts in building a decentralized smart contract platform that leverages Bitcoin.

The next step in the Po.et journey begins now!