POET Whitepaper

1. The Problem and Our Position

Many independent poets and writers have kept creating for years while remaining outside the mainstream literary field of vision: no institutional funding, great difficulty getting published, and scarce recognition from the literary community. Official prizes have their thresholds and blind spots, commercial publishing follows the logic of sales, and one-off donations are not sustainable. Between these existing paths there is a long-standing gap.

POET is not an investment product and not a fundraising vehicle. It is a long-term experimental apparatus of "support + recognition + community". Participants receive tokens and, at the same time, become members of this community.

2. Project Components

The project consists of four connected parts:

• The mining site poet.ninja: the community's daily entrance, where "Typing is Mining" runs (see Section 4).
• The UQn Indie Prize （UQn独立写作奖）: an annual offline award consisting of a cash prize, the honour itself, and POET (see Section 5).
• Guopi Shudian (果皮书店, kpee.art): an independent publishing imprint for poetry collections and fiction. Most prize recipients have previously been published by the imprint.
• UQn.Life (uqn.life): a hidden community for independent writers.

POET is distributed in two ways: "Typing is Mining" distributes 10,000,000 POET and is the primary distribution channel; the UQn Indie Prize distributes 1,000,000 POET. The remaining 10,000,000 POET is allocated to liquidity (see Section 3).

3. Tokenomics

• Total supply 21,000,000 POET, minted once at deployment, fixed forever; the contract makes further minting impossible.
• Allocation (fully distributed on the day of deployment, verifiable on-chain):

• No team allocation, no founder's personal reserve, no presale, no private sale, no ICO. After distribution the deployer wallet's balance is zero and it is retired.
• Release: the mining pool is released linearly at 2,740 POET per day, with no halving in the first 10 years (see Section 4); the treasury is paid out per award.
• The liquidity pool is expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2027; the exact date will be announced separately.

4. Mining: Typing is Mining

"Typing is Mining" will distribute 10,000,000 POET. It is the primary distribution channel of POET and a distribution method without human intervention, open to any writer (in the early phase, participation is by invitation, as a defence against Sybil attacks). The vault distributes automatically according to the programmed rules: 2,740 POET are released every day, for 10 years.

Mechanism details (the current programmed rules):

• Mining: Log in to poet.ninja, type one line in the compose box and submit it — that completes the day's mining. Each piece of writing is limited to 21 characters; every character typed in the box counts (Chinese characters, punctuation, spaces, line breaks and ASCII emoticons each count as 1).
• Equal split: The day's release of 2,740 POET is split equally per person among that day's miners, regardless of how many lines or characters each person wrote. Settlement for the previous day runs automatically at 00:05 (Asia/Shanghai) every day.
• Rollover: If nobody mines on a given day, that day's quota rolls over in full to the next day with miners. The total is never increased.
• Rate limits: At most 5 submissions per minute and 200 per day.
• Plain-text principle: There is no feed, no likes, no comments, no reposts and no following on the site; writing is visible only to its author by default. The single exception is the "Little Note": after mining, each miner may open one random note per day — a piece of writing another miner wrote that day. Notes are not visible after midnight, and there is no interaction of any kind.
• Immutable: Once submitted, writing cannot be edited or deleted — by its author or by administrators.
• Account rules: Registration is by invitation (invite codes are issued by the administrator, one code per person, with the source recorded). A username is chosen once and can never be changed. The site has no password recovery channel of any kind — if a password is lost, the account and its entire POET balance are locked forever and cannot be retrieved (while logged in, the password can be changed by proving the current one). Keep your username and password with the same care as a crypto wallet.
• Ledger and withdrawals: Account balances are POET from day one; there is no distinction between points and tokens. Once withdrawals open, a balance of 1,000 POET or more can be withdrawn to the member's pre-bound address on Base (the first binding takes effect immediately; changing the address has a 48-hour cooldown). The site offers no transfers between users.
• Multi-account defence: This mechanism does not promise to eliminate multi-accounting. Instead it combines scarce, traceable invite codes, the daily attention cost of genuine human mining, and review at the withdrawal exit, so that cheating pays less than honest use of the same time. This is stated plainly, without exaggeration.

5. The Prize and Governance

The UQn Indie Prize will distribute 1,000,000 POET. It is an annual award; its jury consists of the 7 largest holders of POET. Each award is 100,000 POET plus RMB 10,000 in cash, continuing for 10 years.

• Positioning: the prize goes to marginalised independent writers who keep creating outside the mainstream spotlight — mainly poets, and also including avant-garde fiction and other literary forms. The prize consists of three parts: a real cash award, the honour, and POET with its sense of mystery and future. The award ceremony is a small party: a citation, a guest presenter, and then free conversation over drinks.
• Jury selection: based on personal holdings on the annual snapshot day, the top 7 are taken, by relative ranking only; system addresses (mining pool, liquidity, treasury, etc.) are excluded. Roles are not exclusive: a miner can become a recipient, and a recipient can become a juror — an open path.
• Two independent budget lines: the cash prize and the token prize are two independent budgets; pausing one does not affect the other (see Section 8).
• Limits of administrator power: the administrator's only enforcement tool is closing accounts that break the rules (for example, posting harmful content such as fraud leads, once discovered, to a permanent ban); actions are logged and reversible. Administrators cannot edit or delete anyone's writing, cannot recover anyone's password, and cannot mint, freeze or move anyone's on-chain tokens.

POET is the project's valuable equity token, usable for rights such as trading and voting in governance.

As a public-interest project, all value of POET flows entirely to the support of independent poets and writers.

The POET held by a holder is a token of their support for, and attention to, independent poets and writers.

6. Funding Model

• One-time input: the initial liquidity pool seed of 15,000 USDC (sunk once the pool is created, not recoverable).
• Annual expenditure, in scale: a cash prize of RMB 10,000 per year; operating costs such as servers are small.
• The token system and the cash prizes never transfuse each other: mining distribution does not depend on the cash budget, and the cash prizes do not depend on the token price.
• The treasury's funding is arranged by the founder personally (personal input and sponsorship) and is not elaborated in this whitepaper.

7. Technical Architecture

• Chain: Base mainnet.
• Contract: POET, at 0x86dd2ce34a8c3884ad3c3191451f30e302538753, deployed on 12 October 2026 and signed by the founder personally. The plainest fixed-supply ERC-20: no owner privileges, no minting, no burning, no pause, no blacklist, no upgrade path; the source code is verified and public on Basescan for anyone to inspect.
• Site: a self-built Go single binary with SQLite — the rules are the code. Equal splits, rollovers and settlement run automatically; daily settlement results are published on the site's public ledger page and the accounts can be re-checked. Accounting invariant: the sum of all ledger balances + amounts withdrawn + amounts not yet issued = 10,000,000, always equal to the mining vault's on-chain balance.
• Wallet structure: four separate wallets — deployer (one-time, retired), liquidity, project treasury, and mining vault — each with its own seed phrase, kept offline by the founder. The mining pool's coins are cold-stored at the vault address; the server never touches the vault's keys. Withdrawal payouts (when open) follow the path "vault → payout hot wallet (holding only a few days of payouts) → the miner's bound address" as plain ERC-20 transfers, with no custom withdrawal contract, and gas is borne by the project.

8. Roadmap and the Non-Commitment List

This whitepaper only promises:

• Already in place: the token is deployed and fully allocated; the mining mechanism is running under the rules of this whitepaper; the first UQn Indie Prize has been awarded.
• Liquidity pool: expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2027 (see Section 3); the exact date will be announced separately.
• Explicitly not promised: the time at which withdrawals will open; any arrangement after the first ten years — including whether a second mining pool will be created and whether buyback funds will continue the prize. If buyback funds are insufficient after ten years, the relevant phase may pause for a year, two years, or permanently, without affecting the existence of the project or anything already distributed.
• No price or return is promised. POET currently has no market price; even if one forms in the future, its rise or fall does not affect the honour and cash parts of the prize.

9. Risk Statement

• POET is not an investment product. Buying or holding POET creates no expectation of return and no claim or right against the project; its market price (if one forms) can go to zero.
• This is a public-interest project initiated by the founder personally. It is not a registered charitable organisation and does not accept funds for investment purposes.
• Technical risks: although the smart contract is designed to be as simple as possible, unforeseen possibilities remain; the site and key custody carry single-person points of risk. The founder mitigates these with four separated wallets and offline seed-phrase custody, but no system can be guaranteed flawless.
• The policy and regulatory environment may change; the project will adjust or suspend relevant parts within the legal framework.

Appendix A. Parameter Table

Appendix B. Glossary

• Typing is Mining: the distribution mechanism in which typing one line a day is the proof of participation, and the day's release is split equally per person.
• Mining: the state of a miner having successfully submitted at least one piece of writing on a given day.
• Rollover: an unclaimed day's release quota moving to the next day with miners.
• Little Note: one randomly drawn piece of another miner's writing from the same day, openable once per day after mining and invisible after midnight.
• Vault / Treasury: the mining pool wallet and the project fund wallet respectively, both seed-phrase wallets held by the founder.