Po.et began working in 2016 to leverage blockchain tech to build a better, more trustworthy, fair, and transparent system to track ownership of digital content and assets. This vision turned into a product with 3 distinct stages. Today, we want to share an update about Po.et’s road ahead.
Stage 1: Data attribution and stamping into Bitcoin.
This was the original inspiration for Po.et, and is heavily covered in the original whitepaper. This set of use cases was the most well defined, documented, and scoped as a standalone feature, that could also become the foundational building block for everything Po.et built for data attribution and storage. The entire roadmap for this stage has been completed as of approximately a year ago and is working very reliably as open source software with community contributions.
Early on, Po.et realized that this vision for a “verifiable web” couldn’t exist without a secure, decentralized way to store and deliver that data as well. We realized that building this was a huge undertaking, so we partnered with and invested in a project called MadNetwork in 2018 to develop this novel, trustless data storage network. MadNetwork’s mission to decentralize and democratize advertising, the monetization of content, was adjacent and complementary to Po.et’s.
Stage 2: Attribution and monetization tools on Ethereum.
During this stage, Po.et explored more advanced use cases that can be built on the foundational data attribution and node infrastructure that Po.et originally set out to build. The concept was to both use the POE token as a payment utility token for licensing and monetizing claims on the network, as well as to unlock additional API features by holding or staking POE. One of the concepts we looked at for the token was around file storage, but we didn’t want to start building a file storage protocol from scratch, especially as we’d already invested in MadNetwork. While there was not a specific roadmap set for this stage when Po.et began, we knew that the smart contract space was evolving quickly and that there were all sorts of interesting applications to explore.
Unfortunately, this stage has yet to yield many results. We added some of the API features that could be unlocked with POE, but we ran into significant scaling, storage, and transaction fee issues while building on Ethereum. Because of this, Po.et evaluated the options for moving away from Ethereum or an ERC-20 token, such as the Echo smart contract infrastructure. These same challenges have spurred many other projects to migrate blockchains, or to build a custom layer 2 / sidechain for Ethereum to enable the speed and transaction cost necessary for these use cases to become viable.
Stage 3: Data storage network and Ethereum sidechain.
Very early on in Po.et’s development, we realized that attribution of data stamped into Bitcoin would have limited applications without a secure, decentralized way to store and deliver that data as well — similar to the goals of projects like Filecoin and Sia. We knew that this trustless data storage network would be a critical component for smart contracts and dapps moving forward. To that end, Po.et decided in 2018 to dedicate some resources to creating a storage network that Po.et could leverage.
We didn’t have these capabilities in house, so we looked to our partnership with MadNetwork to develop a novel, secure data storage network (that eventually became a sidechain for Ethereum). Additionally, we invested in another project called Inkrypt that was building out a privacy-preserving data network.
As Mad grew, it started building the fundamental layer that almost all enterprise solutions need: the ability to validate the identity of anything — whether its people, assets, organizations, devices, etc. — in the digital world. The Mad team was even tapped to build a first of its kind content validation app backed on top of their blockchain’s identity layer. Now, after 3+ years of concerted development efforts, the Mad data network/protocol is nearly ready to launch and already has announced Verizon as a customer.
The Mad team is tackling the most important problem with the internet today — identity validation — and its uses in content and monetization. The MadNetwork combines the best of Po.et’s focus on data stamping and integrity with Mad’s decentralized, verifiable data storage capabilities.
Po.et has committed to locking up its MAD and POE into liquidity pools. We will also stake the remaining MAD Tokens on the new MadNetwork.
Thanks for coming along with us on this journey and for believing in Po.et’s mission to leverage blockchain tech to build a better, more trustworthy, fair, and transparent system to track ownership of digital content and assets.
Follow along MadNetwork for more updates by joining the community on Telegram https://t.me/getmadnetwork
