What Is Poe Coin?

Thanks to the immense success of Bitcoin (BTC), we started to think of blockchain technology as only a medium for creating tokens that can be used primarily for financial purposes. However, blockchain technology, coupled with smart contracts and DeFi tools, has a lot more to offer than just that. Its decentralised structure makes a lot of room for developing some highly original apps and tokens with unique features, such as Po.et.

Po.et is an innovative application token that offers a solution for licensing and accreditation problems that digital content creators face today. In this article, we’ll talk about how Po.et works, how you can use it to license your content, as well as how good of an investment tool the Poe coin is. So, let’s get started!

How Did Po.et Start?

Like we just said, Po.et is an application that offers licensing and ownership rights for digital products like artworks, blog posts, videos, photos, etc. If you’re not a digital content creator, you might not have thought about it before, but tracking this kind of information online is not a hassle-free game.

Since the exchange of information grows exponentially every day, it’s getting very hard to keep track of the ownership of the content created and shared online. This means that the content you invested your time, energy, resources, and talent in can be copied only with a couple of clicks and reposted on any platform without crediting you.

You might be thinking: “Well, if the creators didn’t want their content stolen, then why didn’t they license it properly before sending it out in the jungle we call the Internet?” Yeah, but you should also know that seeking proper licensing can be a painful and expensive process that takes time and involves lawyers. For this reason, the content posted online usually doesn’t end up getting licensed.

This is where Po.et enters the stage – the first non-financial application on the blockchain and a universal ledger designed to track ownership of digital content across the world.

Po.et’s media and strategy lead Max Bronstein explains that the project was birthed from some Bitcoin Magazine’s problems regarding content ownership. Po.et was established with an ICO in 2017, with the purpose of keeping an official and reliable track of any work posted online and its owners, creators, and usage rights. 

Po.et seems like a serious project as its founders hired two digital media heavyweights, Richard Titus and Greg Clayman, in their advisory board. Some of the media outlets they formerly worked with include the Daily Mail, MTV, Vimeo, BBC, News Corp, and BTC Media. So, Po.et looks like a serious project that has already penetrated some media giants. But how does it work?

How Does Po.et Work?

Po.et is an open-source, decentralised ledger (blockchain) operating on the Ethereum (ETH) network. It comes with a token, POE, which is among the ERC-20 Tokens and is specifically designed to track ownership and attribution for digital works.

It uses the Proof of Existence (PoE) consensus protocol and works by timestamping each piece of submitted content and keeping them on an immutable ledger. 

If the work undergoes any changes, for example, when a blog article is updated, the Po.et blockchain creates a unique hash file to identify the changes. This way, if there’s ever a debate over the ownership of digital work, creators can refer to the Po.et ledger to prove their rights via the timestamp and the hash file the blockchain keeps. 

By doing so, Po.et is aiming to build a bridge between creators and publishers while enabling the discovery of new content by providing a medium for artists and creators to share their work. Plus, it makes it easier to monetise the original creator when others use the digital products on their own projects.

Thus, by creating such a platform, the Po.et team aims to build an institutional, globally accredited record of digital media assets.

Po.et has a marketplace where you can add content (text, photos, videos, drawings, etc.) on the blockchain and sell ownership rights and licencing via POE. Once you upload your content to Po.et, the blockchain assigns a unique fingerprint to your content. And once your content is linked to its unique fingerprint, the blockchain makes it unalterable – a concept you might be familiar with through regular cryptocurrency blockchains.

Is Po.et Applicable From a Legal Perspective?

All the properties we have just discussed are valid if they are legally binding and can be enforced by law. Otherwise, proving ownership on a blockchain that has no sanctions is a meaningless effort.

However, this is a tricky subject as it depends on international law. For example, if you’re a content creator in Australia, it would be challenging to track down a plagiariser in Eastern Europe and deal with their country’s laws on plagiarism. Blockchain-based evidence might be more applicable to legal plagiarism cases in the future; however, at the moment, it is still an emerging technology. In short, the records on Po.et don’t have legal authority, as its whitepaper also makes clear. 

Having said this, you can still dispute cases referring to Po.et without referring to legal authorities if the platform you are having trouble with accepts your claims. Plus, even though Po.et’s ledger doesn’t have much authority in legal cases at the moment; this could change in the future. Blockchain evidence can easily become a regular practice in legal disputes regarding plagiarism and ownership thanks to its immutability, efficiency, and conformity.

What Is POE Coin?

Poe Coin is a rather small coin with a relatively lower market price and trading volume compared to other coins. It has a circulating supply of around 3 billion POE at the moment with no cap on its maximum supply. 

Basically, Poe Coin is the currency you would use as a medium of exchange when buying and selling digital asset usage rights, just like how Flickr makes you pay the owner of the content you want to download.

The beauty of Poe Coin is the fact that it operates on a blockchain, making it possible to have a decentralized marketplace where you can pay the owner with POE, without having to pay commission to intermediaries as well. 

The platform also lets you stake your POE. You might think that staking is a property of Proof of Stake consensus mechanisms and has nothing to do with Poe Coin’s Proof of Existence consensus mechanism, and you are right. However, staking POE works in a different way.

In return for your staking, the POE blockchain makes your content discoverable to others instead of giving you a staking reward in Poe cryptocurrency. 

We already talked about how you can pay content owners with POE using Po.et’s marketplace. In addition to purchasing the original content, you can also buy licences for the content to republish it. So, for example, if you want to publish someone’s digital drawings on your blog, you can buy a licence to do so instead of purchasing the artwork.

Po.et is a fully decentralised blockchain. The decisions regarding Po.et’s future are taken through DAO voting. Every POE token staker claims a right to vote on Po.et’s governmental schemes. You can even offer modifications to POE’s source code if you are into cryptocurrency development. 

Is Poe Coin a Good Investment Decision?

According to CoinMarketCap’s price charts, the Poe Coin price was around 0.005 USD in November 2017 while, at the beginning of the following year, it hit its all-time high of 0.2 USD, folding its value 40 times. It was around this time that POE started entering the crypto investors’ radar. However, that expansion turned out to be an overshoot, and the price of POE decreased back to its previous price range within a couple of months, closing 2018 at 0.05 USD. Since then, POE hasn’t experienced a sharp increase.

Thanks to its huge circulating supply (around 3 billion), PEO’s market cap has remained at around $300 thousand throughout 2021. However, its liquidity is not very impressive as its average daily trading volume was around $80 throughout the same year. Therefore, if you are looking for a solid investment instrument, there might be other coins better suited to you because the price of POE doesn’t seem to be experiencing steady growth. 

However, even if it doesn’t decrease sharply at some point, investing a big amount of your capital on POE has an opportunity cost, like giving up the liquidity of your capital or not investing in funds that have higher expected yields. On the other hand, if POE sticks around, there is a chance that it might skyrocket again. And there are a couple of reasons to expect this shift.

Use Cases of the POE Cryptocurrency

Unlike many other altcoins, POE offers a real solution to a real problem. It has a use-value that’s a very important property for a digital currency. After all, keeping track of copyrights is a very attractive feature, and it might draw more attention from content creators all over the world.

At the moment, media companies such as Shutterstock are already monetising the service they offer for sharing the content directly from its original creators.

POE is not only a better way to do this, thanks to its immutable and decentralised blockchain, but it can also integrate many platforms into one body, thus providing a better-regulated marketplace that gives more power to content creators. 

On the other hand, widely adopted search engines like Google, and social media platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube, already have some sophisticated algorithms to find the original content.

Plus, platforms such as Flickr, ArtStation, or Shutterstock pay content owners in fiat currencies, whereas the Po.et blockchain pays in POE tokens. This might deter some users, as it creates an extra step in monetising their content. Moreover, with the emergence of NFT’s, there is already a widely adopted blockchain solution for licencing digital media.

Overall, the best financial advice would be to consider POE if its use-value directly benefits you, i.e. if you are a content creator and looking to license your work or benefit from Po.et ledger’s staking options make your work visible to others on the blockchain. However, if you want to invest in POE as a financial instrument, you should keep in mind that it is a highly risky asset that might end up folding your capital double digits in the long run or leave you with nothing. 

A Few Words Before You Go…

POE Coin is the world’s first non-financial blockchain network, offering a tool for tracking ownership and attribution for digital content. It has solid use cases that might attract the attention of content creators worldwide.

Unfortunately, the POE price has been performing poorly for the last couple of years and shows no sign of increasing. However, the major factor that will determine the POE token’s success is its adoption rate.

The more people start to adopt it, the more valid it will get as a crypto token. So if you have a reason to think that Po.et’s features have intrinsic value, keep an eye on its further development and make a small investment to start with.

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