edition in our series of events to educate the industry on blockchain technology and its application. In this event we will focus on what is working today with product demonstrations from AdNode, AdEx, and RTBAsia. The panel discussions will dive deep into key topics like cryptocurrency or coins use in adtech, cryptography and how it can support transparency and authentication in adtech transactions, and how blockchain brings efficiency in reconciling campaign data. We will also present updates on blockchain working group initiatives including the Transparency Primer, PrivacyChain and Network Pilot results along with updates on industry and regulatory environment. For inquiries regarding this event please email techlab@iabtechlab.com. Sponsorship opportunities are available.

our privacy. But we did expect the Regulator to play their role in fixing the problem.

The initial steps were promising. The ICO investigated the issues in our complaint and wrote a highly critical report, finding the industry to not be complying with the GDPR. That was no surprise to us, as our complaint outlined how the AdTech industry could not comply with the basic premises of the data protection regime. 

The ICO also held two industry-wide meetings, where the industry could not provide answers to our complaints. Google and the Internet Advertising Bureau introduced changes to their systems, with the IAB amending their “trust and consent framework” and Google making some changes to the manner in which personal data is disseminated across the AdTech ecosystem. 

However, while those changes were welcomed by the ICO as progress, the truth is the changes were very cosmetic and did not cure the problems and data protection concerns that we had raised. There was nothing that looks like substantive meaningful change in practice.

The net result is that we have been bitterly disappointed. Two years after Michael Veale and I filed a formal complaint to the ICO, the actual results to improve the industry are very poor.

The “pause” to investigations during the COVID-19 period was also highly disappointing. There was no reason to shut down this process, even temporarily. The abuse continues at huge scale and needs resolving. Other data protection authorities in Europe are continuing with their processes, and are beginning to get results.

When we asked questions about the pause in the investigation and when the ICO will start taking steps to address the conduct that the ICO had found to be unlawful, the ICO did not engage with. Instead, the ICO took the decision to shut down our Complaint entirely rather than answer our questions and keep us updated.

This is an extraordinary action. If the ICO is entitled to shut down a complaint, without progressing those complaints at all and not providing any update for a number of months then what is the point of the Complaint process? How can the ICO be said to acting to protect data subjects when there is no resolution about conduct the regulator has identified as breaching basic rights?

The ICO’s position is not just startling for our Complaint, but also speaks to a broken regulatory system. If the ICO’s position is correct, the ICO could decide not to act on any complaint. It would have complete discretion to find widespread abuse but ignore it, as it has done with our Complaint.

Our point is simply that we as data subjects are entitled to a remedy. Regulators, when they find systemic abuse, need to regulate. Which brings us to the other, age old question: who watches the watchers? Who is the regulator accountable to?

The GDPR provides for a data subject to have an “effective remedy” against a decision of a Supervisory Authority, namely, the ICO. That “effective remedy” takes the form of a statutory appeal under s.166 of the Data Protection Act. Unfortunately, that statutory appeal route has been interpreted narrowly by the Tribunal to date.

We therefore want to both have the decision to close our Complaint scrutinised and to ensure that the rights of data subjects against the ICO are upheld in full. It is not enough to complain about the law and the inaction by the regulator. We are here to change those laws and conduct.

That is why then we are going to the Information Tribunal. We must seek a remedy and accountability for the ICO through the mechanism that was envisaged under GDPR to do this. It is extremely important that this mechanism is made to work. The ICO must be accountable, complaints must be resolved, and, ultimately, the AdTech industry must be made to operate within the law.

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requires the use of the Domain Name System (DNS), which effectively acts like a phonebook for the Internet. Businesses called domain name registrars lease domain name registrations to the general public. Records of global registrations are centralised and kept by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for managing and coordinating the Domain Name System to ensure that every address is unique and that all users of the Internet can find all valid addresses. It also oversees and coordinates the distribution of unique IP addresses and domain names, and that each domain name maps to the correct IP address. By contrast, blockchain-based domains rely on a blockchain made up of complex smart contracts to create and maintain websites, which have their content stored on a decentralised network. This means there is no single database with records of the domains and their current owners. One of the most well-known examples of a blockchain based domain system was developed by cryptocurrency platform Ethereum and is called the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Much like the domain name system translates IP addresses into simple, easily readable names, blockchain-based domains converts complicated and long cryptocurrency addresses into human-friendly strings. The primary purpose of the system is to simplify cryptocurrency payments, by allowing users to create a single website which acts as their crypto wallet. However, more recently Draper Associates and Boost VC launched Unstoppable Domains, which makes bolder claims about the capabilities of blockchain domains. While the main focus of Unstoppable Domains is also on cryptocurrency payments, it promises another feature – the ability to build unregulated, uncensorable, and unremovable websites. MyBroadband spoke to South Africa’s Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) and Luno Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder Timothy Stranex to understand the potential and dangers of this technology. Stranex said that it was important that decentralised systems like Unstoppable Domains were available as alternatives to centralised systems like ICANN, due to the possibility of censorship. “One of the reasons is that centralised systems are always subject to geopolitics,” Stranex said. He said the US planning to ban TikTok and China banning certain US  companies were examples of this and stated that these types of restrictions could be extended to domain names. “A court can order a registrar to remove or expropriate a DNS domain name whereas it cannot do so for a blockchain domain name,” Stranex explained. While this would be ideal in a situation where a site is blocked or removed for seemingly unjustifiable reasons, it creates another problem. If a site were to host illegal content like pirated movies or child pornography, or acts as a platform for illegal activities including black market weapon trading or human trafficking, there would be no way of shutting it down. However, while blockchain based domains are not subject to regulation from ICANN, they use an alternate root which requires certain modifications to certain network settings to be accessed. Unstoppable Domains currently offers its own browser and a plug-in for the Chrome browser to facilitate this. This means that although it may be impossible to shut down a website once created using its blockchain-based systems, access to the site can still be limited by Unstoppable Domains or any third party which provides access to its alternate root. In the event that a blockchain-based website hosts either illegal content or content that is deemed inappropriate, it can therefore still be censored. This was one of the reasons ISPA disagreed with the idea that blockchain-based domains can be a general-purpose replacement for DNS. It said the fact that blockchain domains require the use of alternative DNS roots subverts the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) processes and creates a “new source of truth”. “They effectively fragment the Internet and create a separate parallel version of it that is only accessible to the subset of consumers that have bought into their alternative root.” “At best this creates confusion when one consumer doesn’t know why their friend is able to access something they cannot. At worst, it results in namespace collisions,” ISPA said. For example, the current top-level domains used by Unstoppable Domains are .crypto and .zil. Since these strings are not reserved in the mainstream DNS, another party can apply to ICANN to establish them as a new gTLD. Another problem was that the transaction performance of blockchains is not well-suited to the swift changes happening on the Internet. “Traditional hierarchical DNS is designed to ensure changes can happen quickly and responses can be cached.” “Blockchain, on the other hand, is designed to ensure transactions cannot be repudiated, and this comes at the cost of agility,” ISPA explained. “It is hard to envision a blockchain-based solution being able to handle the traditional CDN world where DNS may change every minute, and different geographies get different answers,” ISPA said. Stranex submitted that blockchain domain technology may be insufficient at scale. However, he added that it could be used to cut out middlemen like registrars and TLDs, and avoid reliance on centralised entities. “It may also be easier to trade (buy and sell) domain names – this is possible with normal domain names but is extremely clunky and requires escrow systems,” Stranex noted.

Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to court over the regulator’s failure to stop unlawful practices by the Digital Advertising Technology (AdTech) industry.

A complaint was made in September 2018 by Jim Killock and Dr Michael Veale to the ICO about the systemic breaches of the GDPR by the AdTech industry, focusing on the role of the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau), a trade industry body as the rule setter.

The ICO’s investigation which was concluded in June 2019 found the AdTech industry to be in breach of the GDPR with widespread and systemic problems with industry practices such as collecting and sharing people’s browsing history without any control over who ends up accessing such personal information. [1]

However, despite founding unlawful practices, the ICO decided to close the investigation in September 2020 without taking any substantive action. [2] The ICO had also ‘paused’ enforcement during the first COVID lockdown. [3]

The co-complainants (Jim Killock and Dr Michael Veale) are now taking the regulator to court over its refusal to take substantive action against what their own investigation concluded were very serious and extensive unlawful practices.

Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and one of the two complainants, said:

“The AdTech industry has driven a coach and horses through the GDPR and the ICO’s own investigation has highlighted widespread systemic abuses in the AdTech industry practices. But instead of taking action against, it has decided to close the investigation. We are determined to ensure that the law is enforced even when the regulator can’t be bothered to protect our rights and liberties.”

Dr Michael Veale, an academic at the University College London (UCL) who sits on the Advisory Council of the Open Rights Group and is a co-complainant against the AdTech industry to the ICO, said:

“The ICO is expected to protect individuals against complex misuses of their sensitive data by entire industries acting outside the law, not just the simple, low-hanging fruit it can easily enforce against. This lawsuit is about stopping the ICO sweeping the most difficult cases under the carpet. Adtech isn’t simple — but dealing with illegal adtech is the ICO’s job.”

Ravi Naik, Legal Director of the data rights agency AWO who is instructed to act on behalf of the complainants, said: 

“Our clients simply want to the ICO to act to prevent widespread and systemic abuses of human rights; abuses that the ICO has acknowledged occur. Rather than take steps to address those problems, the ICO have acted against our clients and closed their complaints because our clients asked them to take action. This appalling state of affairs has left our clients with little option than to take the Commissioner to the Tribunal. That the Commissioner is being taken to the Tribunal because of a refusal to act to protect our rights speaks volumes of the Commissioner’s record. “Our clients seek no more than the protection of our rights. Why the Commissioner is refusing to act to protect us all is a matter they will have to justify to the Tribunal.”

ORG are seeking donations to cover the cost of the challenged.

ENDS 

Al Ghaff 07951265812 / press@openrightsgroup.org  

Notes to the Editor:

[1] ime-bidding-report-201906.pdf The ICO’s investigation concluded that:

[2] See correspondence between ICO and ORG, available on request

[3] 5/ico-statement-on-adtech-work/

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2018 (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); It’s lost. The Digital Ad Industry has been struggling with this for some time and when Mark Zuckerberg faced Congress sporting the tie that he’s refused to wear for the entirety of his 15-year career at Facebook, it marked the nadir. So what can our industry do to solve this trust problem? There is no silver bullet but I’ll offer three suggestions that can put us on the right path. First of all, we need to promote “responsible growth” and not growth at all costs.  For as long as I can remember, the industry has been VC-fueled which drives most start-ups to do things they don’t want to do.  I’ve watched this up close with a competitor of mine called Videology.  Backed by VC powerhouse NEA among others, Videology had to pivot and grow its business in ways that were irresponsible. The business started in advanced TV, pivoted to online video and ultimately ran at the programmatic business all in the span of its ten years in business. While the company never did any of these things well, it ultimately lost tens of millions of dollars and at last went bankrupt leaving an industry full of publishers holding the bag of significant losses. I don’t mean to just jump on one bad actor as there were many more who ran fraudulent campaigns in order to drive revenue at all costs for its investors.  In a 4q campaign for Papa John’s back in 2014, my company Torrential ran alongside most of the other video suppliers and produced the only real click-through rate of the campaign.  All the others, which included companies such as Yume, Videology, AOL and YouTube had CTR at or near zero suggesting a lot of very bad/fraudulent inventory.  Torrential’s CTR was around 3-4% by contrast.  No CTR is a sign that no one is watching or seeing the ad impressions. This irresponsible growth is not a secret.  Prevalent fraud across the industry has given rise to a cottage industry of “view ability” companies such as Moat, Integral Ad Science, and Doubleverify who’s job it is to make sure people actually “viewed” the ad!  It didn’t have to be this way and shouldn’t going forward.  We must prioritize “responsible growth” over growth at all costs if we’re going to solve the trust issue.  It’s not easy to do, but must be done. The second suggestion toward solving trust in the digital ad industry is human involvement along with the technological automation.  This is something the leader in the industry, Google, instituted, though it remains to be seen if they’ve done enough. Google’s YouTube has been caught running its advertisers in front of terrorist videos and hate content.  This led to the pulling of advertisers ranging from P&G to AT&T and prompted the IAB to organize it’s first white paper on the industry’s fraud problem. In response, YouTube announced the hiring of a team of editors to audit incoming content and screen its running in tandem with major brands.  This seems like a great solution for adoption across the board.  As others like YouTube automate more and more of their processes, the idea of human involvement can soften the blow of black and white automation. More human involvement in the Sales process would also be helpful to solve the trust issue in our industry.  More and more automation has come to the sales side of the digital ad industry and not all of it is welcomed.  Programmatic platforms have accelerated that trend and while long-term, programmatic will be a mainstay, today it’s driving a lot of poor execution.  Salespeople in place to help manage this work would go a long way toward easing this transition.  Buyers would do well by hearing from someone (phone calls seem to be a way of the past) to help walk through the growing pains.  Hand holding has worked in the media industry for over 50 years and it’s comeback can go a long way towards solving the issue of trust today. The final suggestion I offer with regard to solving trust in Digital Advertising is Blockchain.  This is an area I’m specifically leaning into with a new company called Video ICO.  Blockchain, at its core, is a public digital ledger.  It provides the platform that verifies and validates business through a distributed network of “nodes” and removes any misinterpretation of parties by making transactions permanent across the blockchain.  The IAB issued its first white paper on Blockchain in February 2018 and offered it up as a potential solution to the industry as well. Unfortunately for Blockchain, crypto-currency has gone a long way toward tarnishing the reputation of the technology.  Bitcoin has gone sky high in value and has fallen almost as hard.  The fortunes made in Blockchain have attracted a lot of bad actors and has stolen the headlines away from Blockchain’s real virtues.  But this story has a strong analogy and that analogy was the beginnings of the very Digital Industry we’re working so hard to restore trust in.  We’ve seen this movie before and we can predict that Blockchain’s real value will come to the forefront.  Maybe it can also save trust in the Digital Ad Industry too. These are my suggestions to restoring faith and trust in the $50 Billion Digital Ad Biz. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); # RANKED: The World’s Top 10 Richest Countries (2017-2027). # Revealed: Top Rated Visitor Attractions In Every Country In The World. # The World’s Most (And Least) Expensive Cities For Taxis, 2018.

hereBlockchain, an unmodifiable and unbreachable digital ledger, was conceived 10 years ago to support the cryptocurrency bitcoin. But it has since seeped into new categories, jumping from finance to health care and, more recently, digital advertising. It's doing so with the backing of big companies like IBM and Comcast, as well as smaller startups like MadHive and Rebel AI.While government-backed legal tender is secured in bank vaults, bitcoin uses a blockchain ledger to guarantee security by providing full transparency around the currency. The ledger tracks each unit of the currency ever created or transacted, and the number of bitcoins held by any individual as well as the path of any single unit of the currency are visible to all.By applying blockchain technology to ad transactions, data owners can securely share their assets without exporting or handing them over to another stakeholder. And media owners can strike a blow against unauthorized sellers and domain spoofers.Blockchains strongest application is for a network where theres mistrust across the stakeholders, said IBMs Media & Entertainment group CTO, Peter Guglielmino.Despite the ad tech communitys interest in blockchain, the potential applications and their level of maturity vary dramatically.So what can blockchain do for the ad industry?Weed out unwanted supply chain intermediaries: Blockchain could help secure the supply chain from intermediaries that manipulate inventory or from third parties like ad blockers.For ousting intermediaries, heres blockchains role: an unethical media seller could trick buyers by creating near-clones of legitimate URLs and tags, like CNN-trending.com or NBCcom.com. A blockchain would stop those capers, since publishers and resellers would be recognizable from their unique blockchain keys instead of gimmicky names, and each unit of inventory would trace back to a true source.Facilitate data sharing: For most companies, their data is among their most valuable assets. So its no wonder that data sharing even with trusted partners can be fraught. But some vendors are pushing blockchain as a means to log data transactions, so data owners know exactly which of its available data assets its partners took, and when.These solutions typically focus on TV ad buying, and require multiple stakeholders to form agreements with each other. In June, IBM formed the AdLedger Consortium with Integral Ad Science, blockchain-based ad tech startup MadHive and Premion OTT ad-buying subsidiary Tegna. The goal is to build a blockchain data-sharing solution geared toward advanced TV advertisers.Comcast also revealed a blockchain-based coalition of broadcasters, including Altice USA, Cox, NBCUniversal and Disney, who would share their data and record those transactions in blockchain. So a vetted, trusted media buyer could execute a campaign against segments provided by members of the Comcast consortium.The process relies on smart contracts, automated protocols that manage transactions on a blockchain. So if Comcast and Cox have different inventory rates for specific content or audiences, or if a buyer wants to blacklist certain supply sources, thats baked into each companys smart contract and dictates how others on the blockchain can access its data.Reselling inventory: NYIAX, a Nasdaq-backed startup that aims to sell media futures contracts over a blockchain, hopes to make advertisers comfortable with buying future inventory contracts. If successful, NYIAX could give pubs more flexibility in how inventory is packaged. Advertisers could lock up inventory over the long term and pubs could score bigger upfront deals or offer different types of discounts. And in this instance, blockchain would serve as the ledger recording all of these transactions and their value.Before anyone gets too excited, remember that blockchain ad tech is still in its infancy and many of the tools supporting the aforementioned applications are still in beta or alpha, or are still as vaporous as an idea.Comcasts blockchain platform isnt expected to go live until 2018. AdLedger is still forming a working group that will dictate policy and API specs for its platform. And NYIAX is still developing proofs of concept with beta partners.Weve talked to hundreds of publishers, all the big holding companies and agencies within them, and its a slow, methodical, phased-in approach, said NYIAX CEO Lou Severine. Itll be some time before were in an RFP-type stage.But blockchain technology is interesting enough such that trade groups are assessing it. The IAB is in an exploratory phase on blockchain and is in talks with startups from the new blockchain ad tech cottage industry, said Alanna Gombert, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab.IBMs Guglielmino said blockchain startups today are using various methods, but as consensus comes to the space, existing systems will be more integrated.He added, Whats important is to set the bar with standards. Then it will be available to anyone to leverage if their companies can step up to that bar and demonstrate value in the chain.Blockchains face tough hurdles in the ad arena. Chief among them: Its too slow to scale.Scaled ad platforms like AppNexus or DoubleClick Ad Exchange process millions of ad calls per second. Bitcoin, meanwhile, handles around five transactions per second.The distributed nature of the blockchain existing and updating alongside every computer on the network around the world is both the benefit and the challenge, said Will Luttrell, co-founder and former CTO of Integral Ad Science who is in a beta phase on blockchain technology startup Curren-C.Blockchains latency makes it impossible, at least for now, to enter the RTB market. Which is partially why early market entrants like Comcasts platform or the AdLedger Consortium are focused more on data sharing and campaign planning than actual media execution.Confirming transactions on a blockchain ledger takes 10-30 seconds, according to Manny Puentes, CEO of the blockchain ad tech startup Rebel AI. Theres going to be a lot of development before they can get that down to the milliseconds used to measure online ad calls.NYIAX works around this issue by selling guaranteed future media and not live inventory.The speed isnt there and, frankly, may never be, Severine said.Whether blockchain transactions will ever fit into an RTB ad tech stack remains an open question for those occupying the market niche.Blockchain ad buying will start with direct deals between media companies and pilot agency or brand partners akin to linear TV contracts due to real-time latency, Gombert said. But once it gets better, and it is, it isnt necessarily limited.Brands and media companies are demanding transparency from digital media but too much of a good thing can hurt you.In addition to scale and speed, theres a transparency issue thats tricky to negotiate, Luttrell said.Consider Comcast's blockchain initative. The broadcasters involved want to expose some data to some buyers, but they dont want other broadcasters on the platform to see what kind of data they share, who they share it with or what rates they charge. Neither do they want their DSPs, SSPs or ad network vendors to be publicly available.Blockchains are incorporating more supply chain stakeholders, said Ken Brook, CEO of blockchain advertising company MetaX. But as you start adding proxies, vendors and data that impacts the logic and delivery of campaigns, it gets technically challenging.MadHive: One of the early advertising blockchains, MadHive is pursuing a partner-driven growth strategy with an early focus on OTT ad budgets. IBM is the first enterprise partner for MadHives AdLedger Consortium, which it hopes will be transacting data-for-data deals, if not actual media buys, by the end of the year. Advanced television is where experimental budgets are happening right now, said founder Adam Helfgott.Rebel AI: This blockchain ad tech startup is hoping to develop direct pipelines between media partners and potential agency or DSP buyers that are more like the verified relationships buyers used to have with media companies, Puentes said. The startups go-to-market play is as a secure buying channel for publishers that want to avoid ad fraud and quality concerns on open programmatic exchanges.MetaX: MetaX is experimenting with a mix of blockchain and off-chain solutions as it tests use cases in online advertising. The company hosts a nonprofit blockchain platform, MetaXchain, while the for-profit entity develops applications that sit on top of its blockchain, like data sharing or attribution tech. The startup is working with one DSP, a brand and an advertising trade group, though none are public, on ways to apply blockchain on behalf of companies that mistrust digital media.Comcast: With its own extensive broadcast portfolio and cable pipes into homes across America, Comcast is pursuing a blockchain data-sharing as a way to allow first-party data matching without the web of intermediaries, like legacy data players Acxiom and Experian, as well as addressable TV ad startups forming a new layer within the broadcast Lumascape, that add value but absorb margins. Comcasts Blockchain Insights Platform has another year and a half before its set to launch from beta, but even with that time educating stakeholders and developing tech integrations is a tall order.NYIAX: Backed by Nasdaqs proprietary blockchain technology, NYIAX aims to let traders buy and sell the rights to future digital media inventory. This would allow online media companies to package guaranteed inventory more like upfront TV deals, though it faces a potential challenge onboarding publishers, who dont think of their inventory as a commodity like salt or corn that can be sold like every unit is equivalent. NYIAX hopes its ad tech Rolodex, with a C-suite made up of former AOL execs and Mediaocean founder and CEO Bill Wise as an investor, will help it get past those sticking points.IBM: The tech giant is in a relatively strong position to establish Bluemix, its cloud-based services suite, as a blockchain frontrunner, Guglielmino said. Ad tech blockchain startups are in the uncomfortable position of finding revenue in a system that doesnt process budgets yet, whereas IBM could stomach the R&D; costs and apply advances in the technology to other industry verticals, like health care and finance.Read the rest of this article hereCategoriesAll CategoriesAdvertisingEcommerceGraphic DesignMarketingMobile MarketingOnline AdvertisingPromotional MerchandiseScreen PrintingSocial Media MarketingWeb Design

customer experiences, build improved customer relationships, and reduce corporate risk.We’ve been tracking the landscape of companies emerging to disrupt marketing with blockchain technology, and, since our first overview in September 2017, the space has expanded rapidly. At that time, there were 22 companies in the landscape. By earlier 2018, there were 88. And now, as of Q1 2019, there are 290. That’s a growth of 13x in just 18 months.Those 290 blockchain projects and companies are tackling five areas within marketing: Programmatic & Decentralized Advertising, Content Marketing, Social Marketing. Commerce, Data, and Management.There is also a set of companies that reward consumers for viewing ads or engaging with ads. Other reward-based categories include: Rewards Content Contributors, Email Rewards for reading emails, and Rewards Video Contributors. One of the most important categories as it relates to GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act is Transparent, User Rewarded Data, where consumers have visibility and ownership of their personal data.We debated whether to restrict the landscape to just “pure-play” Blockchain marketing tech startup entities or to include existing companies building solutions to leverage blockchain technology. Ultimately, it makes sense to include anyone trying to leverage the capabilities of blockchain technology with the intention of helping marketers.Tracking growth in various sectors of the blockchain marketing tech landscape provides a window into where entrepreneurs and startups believe the impact of blockchain will occur, or occur first.The landscape tells you who is out there, not necessarily who is performing. As more of these projects get into the pilot phase and beyond, we’ll be able to provide additional data around how these projects are satisfying marketer needs.Above: Click to get a closer look, or download for best view.We’re also seeing a lot of movement specifically in the AdTech sector, where many groups are looking to solve some of the numerous challenges within advertising, including transparency in the supply chain, fraud mitigation, data privacy, payments and settlements, and putting consumers first.Many are running tests now. The latest this week is from Lucidity, which discovered that just 59.8 percent percent of clicks could be confirmed as human traffic — leaving about 22,000 of 55,000 clicks unaccounted for.The IAB announced a series of pilots with MetaX, FusionSeven, Kochava/XCHNG, and Lucidity back in July, mostly to provide transparency through the programmatic media supply chain. Unilever is testing IBM’s blockchain platform to validate the agreed spend and clarify discrepancies. Additionally, at Advertising Week, Brian Wong showcased Kiip’s test with AB Inbev to verify discrepancies using a single ledger to record time-stamped impression level campaign delivery.We are also seeing significant increases in both the number of employees these entities are hiring and in total investment amounts they’ve raised, which we tabulated at $145 million in the programmatic space, based on press releases. Employee growth examples include Brave with 82 employees up from 25 12 months ago, Lucidity with 35, up from 10, and MetaX with 12, up from 9, based on conversations with each company.There is also a notable inflow of seasoned talent into the industry. Joni Leimala, former Chief Strategy Officer at GroupM is now CEO of AdCoin, and Richard Bush, previously GM of Publisher Solutions at IPONWEB, is now President at NYIAX.Informally, venture funding (as opposed to ICO funding) of blockchain-based marketing tech appears to be becoming the norm, and business models that involve blockchain but for whom tokens are merely a part of an execution strategy are increasingly prevalent. Use of technology appears to be entering a phase of build-out rather than pure speculation.Overall, the growth in the number of venture-funded companies forging ahead into the blockchain space, particularly in a down period for the “crypto” markets, is a powerful signal of an emerging consensus that there is real value to be created through the use of blockchain technologies for marketing, regardless of the success or failure of the token economy.All eyes are now looking forward, to the results from the case studies these first companies are executing. Over the next few months, those experiments will open a new chapter for marketing — one that may well vindicate these early entrepreneurs and their big bets on blockchain.Jeremy Epstein is CEO of Never Stop Marketing and author of The CMO Primer for the Blockchain World. Donny Dvorin is GM of Never Stop Marketing Research.

brands are increasingly losing patience with ad agencies and other players over the lack of transparency in the digital advertising space. Digital ad revenue for the first half of 2017 came in at a record $40 billion, up from $31 billion for the previous year, and it was estimated to have reached $85 billion by the end of 2017. The fight for transparency intensified in 2017 after The Times of London published a report about how the ads of big brands were appearing alongside racist videos on the giant video platform YouTube. Several brands paused their advertising temporarily, until YouTube reassured them that it had taken measures to correct the issue. The issue with YouTube speaks to the larger theme of a lack of transparency in the space. There isn’t enough information at the disposal of the advertiser regarding what they’re buying and how much they’re paying for viewed ads. Duracell, furious after finding out how much of its money goes to hidden fees compared to the actual amount it spent on ads, built its own , whereby it relates directly with a demand-side ad platform and a brand safety vendor — all in a bid to be more informed of its advertising moves. Simply put, advertisers are looking for a more transparent way to connect with their customer and audience.  Typically, the advertiser — the brand that’s looking to connect with its audience — contracts a digital ad agency to manage its entire ad campaign, with the advertiser having a set target it aims to achieve from the campaign. The advertiser pays the ad agency an amount that would cover both the overall cost of creating ad content and the cost of distributing the ad content to the brand’s target audience/customers — these two types of costs are what digital media experts call non-working and working spend respectively. One thing to note here is that an ad agency’s overhead cost is also part of the non-working spend. Once the ad agency has developed the content for the desired channels, it buys ad spaces — also called ad inventories — where the desired audiences would see the content. The ad agency has two options for buying ad spaces: buying directly from the publisher and buying programmatically through an ad exchange platform.  This usually long process fosters a lack of transparency — hidden fees, fraud, traffic, measurement and viewability — especially with programmatic media buying. For clarity, the transparency issues here can be broken into two main parts: The first part is fostered by the long nature of the programmatic ad supply chain, as shown in the image below. With each arrow in the image above, you can think of ad dollars being transferred diminishingly. And in many situations, the advertiser isn't aware of how much each player in this system takes. According to a report from the ad industry trade group IAB, 55 percent of programmatic ad revenue goes to ‘ad tech’ services, while publishers receive only 45 percent. The findings from IAB demonstrate that non-working ad spend (ad dollars that didn't get to the publisher) cost advertisers more than working spend. There are two problems here. First, advertisers don’t usually receive sufficient information about these costs. During a Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit earlier in the year, an unnamed advertising executive : The second problem is that publishers, who actually provide the platform for brands to reach their audiences, are paid less than the intermediaries. The ad fraud and viewability part of the overall transparency issues originate from publishers selling fake impressions (fake clicks and bot traffic). , whereby a publisher somehow presents his domain to be a larger publisher’s domain, is another part of the fraud problem. Ad fraud reportedly the U.S. advertising industry about $6.5 billion in 2017. Again, as in the case of hidden fees, sufficient information on how publishers verify their traffic, and the processes that ad agencies and other intermediaries follow to ensure that they work with publishers with verified traffic, needs to be available to everyone within the ecosystem. This is where blockchain comes in. Indeed, blockchain in advertising is likely to be where we’ll see the most rapid adoption. They are a match made in heaven. Advertising lacks the transparency of data and process. Blockchain offers the transparency of data and process. Here are a few practical ways that blockchain can help bring transparency to the ad buying process. Truth Agency, founded by U.K.-based The Marketing Group, is working to help alleviate the transparency issues in programmatic advertising, mainly by rapidly auditing advertising transactions. As been stated by CEO Mary Keane-Dawson: Given that the problem of transparency is systemic rather than technological, Kean-Dawson believes that taking the entirety of ad buying to the blockchain is an unnecessary and complex endeavor, and that is why Truth Agency is only looking to use blockchain to audit ad transactions. The blockchain startup looked at the ways some of the existing auditing services worked and simplified their processes by splitting it into two key parts: data collection and media contract verification.  The media contract is a ‘dumb contract’ that features the suppliers allowed within a certain campaign: Once Truth has the contract and data stored on the blockchain, it then processes each transaction from each supplier based on the rules written in the contract and publishes an audited version onto the blockchain on an hourly basis The company flags any transactions that cannot be verified through the data it has, such that both the advertiser and the team involved would be notified about the discrepancies.  Global ad software giant Mediaocean partnered with IBM in June to use blockchain to bring transparency to the “entire lifecycle of an advertiser's media dollar flow.” As the statement goes: Transparency issues on the sell-side relate to the fake traffic count, bot clicks and domain spoofing discussed earlier. Verasity — a blockchain-based, video-on-demand platform similar to Vevue — is working to improve publisher transparency with its proof-of-view (PoV) blockchain technology. PoV, which is currently pending patent, is built to securely verify and record content consumption within the Verasity ecosystem. PoV features publicly auditable logs that contain all the view counts as well as anonymized viewer information for media buyers to view, according to Verasity. The company claims that the information included in the logs are GDPR, PCI DSS and ePrivacy compliant. Verasity outlined six steps in its white paper that PoV follows to prevent fake views. TV-TWO, a player in the digital TV space, is also using blockchain to improve the advertising industry. TV-TWO has created a Smart TV app — currently being tested on Samsung and LG smart TVs — that allows consumers to watch a free, personalized video stream that is curated by a supervised learning algorithm, enabling more organic content variety and relevance. Through a campaign management tool, brands are able to book their desired advertising spots on TV-TWO using TV-TWO’s tokens. The startup employs a smart contract, which single-handedly manages all the payments within the TV-TWO ecosystem. The smart contract publishes all the transactions that takes place regarding any single ad video — from advertisers to viewers and TV-TWO — on the Ethereum blockchain without any input from the TV-TWO team. TV-TWO seeks to alleviate the scalability concerns of Ethereum blockchain by deploying off-chain signature patterns and state channel technology. TV-TWO’s supervised learning algorithm is able to serve consumers with highly relevant videos by picking up data on each consumer’s “preferences in traditional TV, in-stream behavior, surveys and other data,” co-founder Philipp Schulz said. To offer relevant ads only, the anonymized data is used for campaign targeting by advertisers. The promise of TV-TWO is to serve consumers with personalized content on TV and offer advertisers accurate, trustless information in their campaigns. TV-TWO recently advertised 20th Century’s recent blockbuster “Deadpool 2” on its platform — as part of its partnership with 20th Century Fox of Germany. Markus Schneider, 20th Century Fox’s German CFO, said the company is delighted with the results of the campaign, stressing the advantage of having direct access to their target groups on TV and paying for actual viewers only. It’s noteworthy that Schneider joined TV-TWO’s advisory board after the “Deadpool 2” campaign. Advertisers are likely to appreciate being able to potentially know the actual number of people who “saw” their ad, but it’s not certain that Verasity’s PoV and TV-TWO’s system will be 100 percent foolproof.  With Verasity, for instance, there’s no way PoV can confirm that a user — even if they meet all the criteria mentioned above — are actually watching a video, although this shouldn’t normally be a problem. After all, if a user visits YouTube to watch a video, they mostly do it for a reason, which means they’ll actually watch the video. It’s a different story with blockchain-based, video-on-demand platforms. The lure to use blockchain streaming services is to earn money by providing your data and watching advertisements.  It’s therefore possible that a user could view videos that contain ads for the sole purpose of earning some money. This means that it’s possible for a user to play a video in a way that meets all the above criteria but stay away from their streaming device to do something else while the video is playing — and still earn money. In this case, even with the publicly available and auditable information of views, advertisers might still be unable to get a genuine sense of the value they get from advertising with Verasity and any other platform with a similar model. One could argue that the tokens available for earning might not be valuable enough to encourage people to try to trick the system in this way. While that could be true, it’s still a downside worth noting. The takeaway from our conversation and research of blockchain in the media space is that blockchain can definitely play a part in moving the media space forward, especially in the advertising space. However, as innovative as blockchain is itself, it cannot, as a single technology, take away all the problems in the media space.

Michael. You may have already heard their names as they’ve have been hard at work with us for the last few months, committed to bringing great success to Shopin.As chief marketing officer, Doron heads up Shopin’s marketing strategy and operations. He is responsible for scaling the brand, ensuring key markets and consumers understand the full value that blockchain and cryptocurrency bring to the retail economy. He most recently was in Miami with the team, helping grow our business and community at The North American Bitcoin Conference — and capturing our winning moment!Doron brings a wealth of marketing experience to Shopin. He came to Shopin from Lotame, where he spearheaded marketing strategies to build the brand and drive global business development efforts.He also previously served as head of market strategy at Tremor Video, head of Business Science at media agency Mindshare, global head of media investment at Samsung’s in-house agency Cheil Worldwide, and held various leadership positions at Millward Brown, IAB, Lycos, Hotbar and Applebee’s.Shopin is also proud to welcome chief revenue officer, Michael Herman. Michael is an experienced senior executive with a demonstrated history of working in the luxury fashion and tech industries.Michael joins our team from luxury women’s fashion brand Elie Tahari, where he was global president of Sales. His 20 year career includes multiple senior positions at some of the retail world’s most prestigious brands, including Donna Karan, DKNY and Valentino, where he cultivated his skills in cross-functional leadership, brand building, innovation and trend forecasting.At Shopin, Michael is responsible for overseeing retail and partner relations and brand growth strategy. He recently had the opportunity to brush elbows and chat up Shopin to some of his previous colleagues in the retail world at NRF 2018 Retail’s Big Show & EXPO.Check out more information about Shopin and our upcoming token sale here: https://tokensale.shopin.com/.And don’t forget to join our Telegram to keep up to date on our latest news: https://telegram.me/shopineverywhere.

tech projects. And while there is criticism across the spectrum – for and against enterprise blockchain as well as whether companies should even invest into it – almost every industry is making a concerted effort to weave it into its infrastructure. With the birth of Bitcoin, the earliest form of cryptocurrency and an example of the first practical use-case for blockchain, it comes as no surprise that the financial industry is paving the way for blockchain innovation. Given the sheer volume of transactions that take place on a daily basis, the financial market is ripe for disruption and in dire need of efficient solutions. Whether it is improving trade finance or streamlining the KYC process, blockchain can reduce extra business costs, remove intermediaries and ensure safety and security throughout. Here are a few formalised examples of enterprise blockchain adoption by major financial institutions: The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) will replace the existing Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) with a distributed ledger system by 2020. The ASX CEO claims that this system will enable customers to develop new services and reduce costs. JP Morgan Chase made several power moves in the space in what appears to be the beginnings of its own mini blockchain ecosystem. Following the launch of the JPM Coin, a digital coin for instant payments, the company is also testing a new privacy protocol, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) which will encrypt blockchain data more efficiently. It is designed for their private ETH blockchain, Quorum. IBM launched the “Blockchain World Wire” – a global blockchain payments network that allows financial institutions to use pegged cryptocurrencies as a bridge asset between any two fiat currencies, like the dollar and euro, for near real-time settlement. It is the first of its kind to integrate payment messaging, clearing and settlement on a single network. Its goal is to revolutionise the way the cross-border payments process so that underserved countries get access to money right away. This is just the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to other players investing and/or implementing enterprise solutions to streamline financial transactions. To add to the mix, Visa, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Santander, Goldman Sachs and others are developing platforms of their own. One of the most popular industries associated with the blockchain world is supply chain, or the flow of goods and services. Industry leaders like Leanne Kemp, CEO of Everledger, a global digital ledger that protects items of value (diamonds, for example), have long touted the ways in which the technology can revolutionise traditional supply chains. The supply chain process has many different steps, forming an assembly line of tasks that need immediate attention. The blockchain can store, record and track these processes more seamlessly, thereby speeding up the flow and cost reconciliations among different parties. This can be applied to many different subsets of supply chain and below are several examples: Supply Chain Finance: Alipay’s parent company Ant Financial announced a new supply chain finance subsidiary called Ant Shuanglian Technology (translation: ‘Ant Double Chain’) to provide financing for SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) who have large corporate customers. Ant claims that traditional supply chain finance companies would only finance 15% of suppliers. But with blockchain, 85% of suppliers can receive financing. Similar companies to do this include Ping An’s OneConnect and Tradeshift. Food Supply Chains: In collaboration with SAP, Bumble Bee Foods launched a blockchain platform to monitor the supply chain of yellow fin tuna from Indonesia to end customers, accessing origin and shipping info using a smart device.  Another organization which has implemented a similar food supply chain program is The United States National Pork Board to keep tabs on the pork supply chain process. Circular Supply Chains: Accenture is teaming up with Mastercard, cloud computing firm, Amazon Web Services, blockchain supply chain company, and Everledger, to better manage inventory, waste elimination and boost sustainability. It will allow customers to find small-scale suppliers and growers and create a rewards program for sustainable practices with direct payments. Real estate is a budding frontier for enterprise blockchain as there are major benefits in direct peer-to-peer transactions on a digital network. Traded assets can increase in value by driving out costs and eliminating middlemen, through the use of smart contracts. Blockchain can potentially ‘fractionalise’ an existing property into smaller units of ownership which are represented by ‘tokens’ or digital shares. This can create an attractive alternative funding arrangement for both buyers and sellers and ultimately improve overall liquidity for this new market. The real estate industry popularised the application of ‘tokenisation’ which means the entire value of a property is digitally represented on a blockchain network (such as Ethereum) in the form of tokens. Many companies have already jumped on this bandwagon. Below are some recent transactions: Three Swiss firms conducted a blockchain-based real estate transaction for nearly $3 million. Blockchain property transaction platform blockimmo Ltd, proptech company Elea Labs Ltd and digital assets service firm Swiss Crypto Tokens Ltd tokenised a property consisting of 18 apartments and a restaurant on the Ethereum network. It was supported by Swiss Crypto Tokens’ stablecoin and pegged to the Swiss Franc, the CryptoFranc (XCHF) to remedy price fluctuation risk. Blockchain-based real estate platform RealBlocks closed a seed funding round with Morgan Creek Digital for a decentralised platform that tokenises shares of private equity funds. It also allows real estate investors to sell shares in both domestic and international markets. Healthcare is another important industry which is constantly under fire, fuelling a never-ending political debate that has plagued the US for years. With a laundry list of fundamental issues stemming from outrageous costs to insurance fraud, we owe it to our society to offer some relief. One company that is trying to innovate and streamline the health care system is Change Healthcare, which runs a clearing house for insurance claims, processing over 30 million transactions per day. Owned by giant pharma distribution company, McKesson, Change Healthcare uses blockchain to address patient eligibility in real time by storing policy coverage information logic in a smart contract. Given the data siloes that exist between providers and insurance companies, this type of service is highly in-demand. Moving on to advertising, digital ad fraud is an enormous problem for the advertising industry, estimated to result in over $10 billion in annual losses. Blockchain solutions are emerging to create greater ad campaign transparency and combat bot-based impression fraud. Blockchain provides a single source of truth for the number of impressions delivered, eliminating disputes between marketing platforms, publishers and advertisers and improving effectiveness. Surprisingly, there are many companies tackling this problem and even payment-related problems in the industry. For example: Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), the world’s largest producer and distributor of beer is partnering with a start-up, Kiip, to write ad impression data to Ethereum in hourly batches. This will save time for media buyers and increase transparency in ad programs. A ‘micro-consortium’ among IBM, the digital advertising firm Mediaocean, and major consumer products firms Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg’s, and Unilever are leveraging a custom version of IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric, to record impression level data as well as related transactional data like purchase orders and payments. AdLedger, a new consortium that includes several industry players, including Salon Media, IPG Mediabrands, iSpot.tv, Tegna, Publicis Media, Mad Network, group m, and the International Advertising Bureau (IAB), aims to also use the Hyperledger blockchain to gain insight into ad campaign effectiveness. Many people take issue with enterprise blockchains because they are private and there is still centralisation around who can participate on the network. This is quite different from public or permission-less blockchains, like Bitcoin, which is open to the public. However, for large corporations that need to have total control of their business, this is a positive thing. It helps them keep track of transactions on the network, KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations, and achieve faster consensus, which offers more privacy, security and scalability. That said, while it is the flavour of the year, enterprise blockchain still has a long way to go before it goes mainstream. There is still a long road ahead for perfecting the use of smart contracts and the level of complexity they can currently handle. We know that blockchain technology works but there are still some kinks to work out before mass adoption comes to any single industry.

is hostile towards the cryptocurrencies? Let’s find out.In 2018, Google announced a ban on all cryptocurrency related ads and prohibited Chrome extensions that mine cryptocurrencies. Many took those moves as meaning that the company had ulterior motives. Pundits and venture capital investors alike weighed in:“It’s just a little bit too convenient for my taste to see a platform ban an entire ecosystem, or an entire market segment, just because they don’t want to spend the time figuring out who the bad actors are,” David Pakman, partner at the venture capital firm Venrock, told Fortune.Another investment firm CEO Phillip Nunn of Blackmore Group, speculated to The Independent: “I suspect the ban has been implemented to fit in with potential plans to introduce their own cryptocurrency to the market in the near future and therefore removing other crypto adverts allows them to do it on their own terms.”Google’s Director of Sustainable Ads Scott Spencer, for his part, insisted the move was consistent with Google’s policies, telling CNBC at the time, “We’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it’s an area that we want to approach with extreme caution.”Around the same time, a tongue in cheek ad produced by Google for an unrelated product, poked fun at crypto while emphasizing the oft-repeated claim that Proof of Work driven coins like Bitcoin are environmentally unsustainable. This fueled the conspiracy theories, many of which have gained traction because it makes sense that Google – and indeed all the currently dominant Internet players – would oppose crypto. After all, crypto offers an alternative to the status quo’s data collection model, and by extension, their advertising hegemony.Proponents of this theory point to the wider tech industry trend to ban crypto. In addition to Google, Facebook, Alibaba subsidiary Taobao, and Twitter all blacklisted cryptocurrency-promoting advertisements on their platforms in 2018. Even MailChimp, a purveyor of email newsletters, announced a wide-ranging ban on crypto promoters.The established Internet giants, of course, have the most to lose from the advent of decentralized technologies and platforms – and the fact that they can unilaterally ban an entire market from advertising underlines the need for alternative structures and platforms.Google, Facebook, and now Alibaba are market monopolies for advertising, together accounting for 61.2% of the total global digital ad market, according to a September report from eMarketer, which predicts global digital ad spending to rise 17.1% to 327.28 billion USD in 2019. Advertising is by far the main source of revenue for Google, whose parent company Alphabet earns roughly 86 percent of its total revenue from advertising, according to CBNC.Advertisers are getting frustrated with increasing advertising costs / the decreasing effectiveness of ads placed on the big three platforms. Consumers, facing advertising fatigue have increasingly become immune to ads, or outright blocked them.According to an IAB report on ad blockers, 26% of respondents said they use ad blockers, with younger users more likely to browse with ad blocking extensions or software. Another digital advertising trends report by Proxima suggested that more than half of online ads aren’t seen by humans (but rather are counted as bot views), and concluded that up to 60% of digital ad marketing spend is wasted.The world’s biggest advertiser, Proctor & Gamble, meanwhile has long expressed its distaste with the status quo. In early 2017, P&G’s CEO Marc Pritchard issued an ultimatum to the digital advertising behemoths, telling them P&G doesn’t “want to waste time and money on a crappy media supply chain.”P&G followed up by cutting, according to the Wall Street Journal, 200 million USD from their digital ad spend through 2017. Pritchard explained his rationale: “We bombard consumers with thousands of ads a day, subject them to endless ad load times, interrupt them with pop-ups and overpopulate their screens and feeds. And with ad blockers growing 40% and fraud as high as 20%, who knows if they’re even seeing our ads,” as reported in the Wall Street Journal.Of course, one of the many hyped potential applications of the crypto-blockchain tech stack is the improvement of digital advertising. According to the white paper of “global decentralized advertising exchange” Ubex, for example, the combination of blockchain, artificial intelligence and the pay per result principle could help to free the Internet from unnecessary ads, reduce the average cost of attracting customers by 50%, and eventually achieve a much higher ad conversion rate. While that’s a rather lofty talk, Brave browser, developed by former Mozilla CEO and Javascript founder Brendan Eich, has quietly amassed over 4M monthly active users according to a November press release, all browsing the web with an entirely different advertising model. The browser, according to batgrowth.com, currently has over 29,000 “verified publishers” – which include a growing list of respected publications like The Guardian and The Washington Post. Those publishers can opt-in to Brave’s “publisher-integrated ads” model, entitling them to 70% of the revenue generated by ads on their site. Of the remaining 30%, half goes to users who have opted-in to view ads (those who haven’t opted in will not see ads), while the other half goes to Brave. Brave browser sees where users spend the most time and then uses this information to calculate the payout for each publisher. This is a blockchain supported solution that seems to have the potential to provide transparency and efficiency in digital advertising – and unlike most “blockchain ideas,” Brave is actually seeing traction.With alternative models on the horizon, advertisers in search of more favorable prices may soon give preference to blockchain-based ad networks. Meanwhile, how could it be that Google and the other tech giants don’t see the writing on the wall? After all, in the past decade – from AI to augmented reality – there’s hardly been a technology that Google didn’t experiment with.President of Google parent company Alphabet, Sergey Brin, claimed that Google simply missed the boat when it comes to crypto, stating as much at a blockchain conference in Morocco in July when he said, “We probably already failed to be on the bleeding edge, I’ll be honest,” as reported by CNBC. Brin – whose son had according to Brin mined Ethereum for “one or two” years previously – suggested that blockchain is within the wheelhouse of X, the company’s semi-secret research division.In an interview with Swiss business newspaper Handelszeitung, Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project and, according to the New York Times, a top 10 most influential leader in blockchain, Brian Behlendorf, said that the established tech giants, “have a blind spot when it comes to blockchain.”In fact, according to research by CBInsights, Google was the second-most active corporate investor into blockchain companies between 2012 and 2017, falling second only to SBI Holdings (which in July launched the first bank-owned cryptocurrency exchange in Japan).Google’s involvement in blockchain was more than just hands-off investments. In 2016, Google started a trial for developers testing blockchain services on its cloud. In early 2018 there were rumors published in Bloomberg that Google was working on blockchain-related technology to support its cloud business and head off competition from emerging startups. Other rumors included that Vitalik Buterin was being pursued by Google, after the Ethereum founder briefly tweeted a live poll asking his followers if he should take an offer from Google, posting what appeared to be a screenshot of the offer. Smart contract platform Cardano was reportedly tapped for an information session with Google, a transcript of which is published on its blog. That led to rumors of a partnership between the Ethereum alternative and Google.Google finally officially entered the blockchain space only in mid-2018 when it announced on its blog that it is partnering with two blockchain startups to bring them to the Google Cloud Platform. For cloud businesses, Google wants to use the blockchain to record user transactions and improve data security and Alphabet plans to offer a license for customers to run their own versions of the blockchain on their own servers.As for blockchain-related patents, Google is not a dominant player, but its activity is far from indicating it is dismissive of the tech. Research published in Sept 2018 by iPR Daily, a Chinese media outlet specializing in intellectual property, shows that Chinese Internet giant Alibaba tops the list for blockchain-related patents, with a total of 90 patents focused on the tech. IBM comes a close second with 89 patent applications. Google, ranked at number 30 (below British Telecom), has made 22 blockchain-related patent applications.One of them, patent US20170177898A1 made in June 2018 and granted in July of the same year, aims to stamp out data tampering:“A system, method or computer readable storage medium configured for storing encrypted data on a blockchain. To write additional data in a blockchain, a request is received at a computing node.”In other words, Google wants to safeguard the integrity of data by using a blockchain system to verify any data stored on its database.When Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf said the established tech giants, “have a blind spot when it comes to blockchain,” he also predicted: “Tech giants such as Google, Amazon, or Facebook will undoubtedly pick up blockchain and generate business models from it. However, I think that the core of Blockchain — as a decentralized technology — will diminish [their] market power,” as reported by Cointelegraph.Google’s investments in blockchain companies and development of blockchain tech indicate that, as predicted by Behlendorf, the tech giant is searching for profitable business models, despite, on the face of it, appearing dismissive of the tech.Whatever profitable blockchain business models Google does come up with, it seems highly unlikely that the world’s biggest advertising platform will disrupt its own advertising monopoly. Instead, it will be up to blockchain startups like Ubex and Brave to take a big enough piece of the digital advertising pie to attract the tech giant’s attention. If and when that happens, the resulting battle may determine the future of a multi-hundred billion dollar industry and no less than the consumer-level experience of the Internet itself.Microsoft removes eight illicit crypto mining apps from storeGoogle’s BigQuery adds six new crypto and blockchain analytics toolsGoogle data scientists interested in Ethereum ClassicUAE and Saudi Arabian banks join crypto cross-border transaction projectRipple, Coinbase, and Circle make Forbes’ fintech top 50 listTencent survey: Chinese economists divided on blockchain and crypto futureYour email address will not be published. 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fraud, which costs the industry over USD$ 16 billion per year. The current anti-fraud technologies attempt to detect the fraudulent data, be it fake users or fake devices, only after the fraud has occurred, meaning data has been propagated into the entire sell-and-demand transaction ecosystem. The policing agency IAB provides the black-and-white-list of fraudulent data as a centralized list, however, these lists can become quickly out-of-date in real time, meaning it can be easily manipulated. Prof. Shoucheng Zhang, Founding Chairman of Danhua Capital, is confirmed to be Chief Advisor of DATA (DTA). Michael Arrington, Founder of TechCrunch and Paul Veradittakit, Partner of Pantera, have also joined DATA as advisors. New strategic partners include Pantera, Alphabit, Kenetic and XRP capital. DATA project is a blockchain based advertising protocol and technology stack carried by a Silicon Valley team and aims to build a Decentralised AI-powered Trust Alliance. Huobi Pro launched the DATA token $ DTA on January 17th, DTA/BTC and DTA/ETH is available for trading from 14:00, January 18 (GMT+8) DATA Project’s core competency and differentiation lay in its unique technology that can identify fraud at the device level and proactively invalidate it, therefore preventing it from leaking into the entire industry network. This is done through being powered by deep learning AI, which applies the most advanced blockchain algorithm that is secured by design, is decentralized by community consensus, and is incentivized through rewards of digital tokens to every player’s contribution toward preventing fraud. A healthy and trusted ecosystem in digital advertising guarantees that the flow of the advertising reaches the target audience whose appetite for quality content and demand for information of goods increases exponentially. By satisfying this demand from our audience, the industry’s growth can be sustained, and profits enhanced. Aside from solutions to data storage and decentralized distribution of data, and AI-based consensus to authenticate the validity of end users and devices, DATA’s core technology and open source contribution also provides the functionality to enable other applications to be created on the building blocks that can support micropayment, smart contract, reward modelling, token distribution and redemption, etc, within a secured yet flexible blockchain and tokenized economy. In the end, every player in the community or the ecosystem will become the ultimate winner through the use of DATA Project. DATA Project will refine a set of protocol standards in digital advertising, in order to be established as the industry standard. To materialize the actual implementation of DATA Project, it has partnered with Yomob International Inc., a unified mobile ad global monetization platform with a reach of 120M monthly users and 2000+ mobile developers. Yomob’s vast reach to the publisher and end-users is the cornerstone of DATA Project to ramp up its proof-of-concept stage and scale to broader adoption. Telegram: http://t.me/blockchainDATA Twitter: https://twitter.com/Blockchain_Data Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/Blockchain-Data-Foundation-1949486855317034/ Github: https://github.com/BlockchainDATA The post Anti-Ad-Fraud Alliance – DATA Proposes to Abolish Fake Users from Advertising Industry appeared first on Bitcoinist.com. Filed Under: Bitcoin Tagged With: Abolish, Advertising, Alliance, AntiAdFraud, Data, Fake, From, Industry, Proposes, Users You must be logged in to post a comment. Follow me on Steemit and earn crypto for your best comments: … [Read More...] Copyright © 2018 Digital Money Times

has put out since then has been very technical in nature, including the Livepeer whitepaper which outlines a protocol for securely creating and incentivizing a decentralized network. In summary, the Livepeer protocol incentivizes nodes to contribute their processing and bandwidth to the network in service of transcoding and distributing live video. The verification of work is solved by a scalable extension on top of the Truebit protocol which incentivizes nodes to perform transcoding operations correctly in order to earn their fees and token allocations and preserve their value earning a role as a transcoder. The gamification of the network and falsework problem is solved via the economics of the delegated proof of stake block reward accounting. It becomes more economically rational to simply stake one’s tokens towards a value-adding node than to pay fees into the network to be distributed to other delegators when performing work that there wasn’t actually real demand for. The end result is a scalable, pay-as-you-go network for decentralized live video broadcast — a missing layer in the web3 stack that Livepeer seeks to fill.Subscribe to Livepeer’s blog to be up to date. Livepeer is an open, community-driven project. The software is open-source on Github and under active development. There is also a nascent forum and chatroom for questions and discussion. Please get involved!See also Raphaela Sapire’s presentation on How Blockchain Can Shift the Paradigm of Video Streaming to get more inspiration:DLive: Live Streaming Community PewDieDie Fled To From Youtube And TwitchDLive calls itself a “disruptive live streaming platform,” and it has a unique hook. It was built using Lino, a decentralized blockchain that was founded in 2017. After Lino raised $20 million in funding, DLive launched in September 2018. According to Variety, it has about 30 employees.DLive allows streamers to earn without high commitment compared to other streaming platforms that require minimums on metrics like stream time, streams, followers/subscribers, etc. Another problem that DLive currently solves is cashing out from the platform to usable funds. An example is Live.me where users are required to reach a minimum of $200 before they are able to withdraw as well as a daily limit of $600.How Does It Work?From the viewer’s perspective, DLive is basically exactly like Twitch. Viewers can subscribe to streams by paying a monthly fee, which will get their messages noticed by the streamer more often.LINO Points are DLive’s currency of choice. The cryptocurrency is how users give donations and get rewards across the platform. 88 Lino points translate to $1.22 and can be purchased on the site using PayPal or a credit card.Viewers can donate a little as one LINO Point, referred to as a “Lemon,” or up to 10,000 LINO Points, known as a Ninjet directly to a streamer.DLive explains that 90.1 percent of subscription earnings and one-time donations go straight to the content creator. The remaining 9.9 percent is deposited into a pool of “Locked LINO,” which is awarded to the most engaged users.Viewers who subscribe to steamers and avidly converse with DLive’s community will gain a little reward in the form of Lock LINO Points every day. Based on their engagement rate, a small sum of the online currency will be redeemable by simply logging in and clicking the yellow “Redeem Now” button in the notification window at the top right of the site.Team DLive explains that these points can be immediately gifted to a streamer or transferred to PayPal or into Bitcoin if they want to cash out. Locked points holders also get access to a few unique perks.Viewers can get rewards by avidly engaging with the community.Anyone with locked LINO Points in their account will be able to shape the direction DLive moves in the future. The live streaming site offers daily questionnaires available only to Locked LINO Point owners.These questionnaires will allow engaged users to vote on decisions relating to the network, and put in requests or vote on future feature upgrades. This way the most active participants in the community have a voice as to the direction of where the site is going (and where the decentralized part comes in).The more locked points you have the more daily rewards you get and the more DLive clout you will eventually have. Users can “lock” their standard LINO Points to boost this number, but they’ll need a minimum of 1,000 to make that transaction.How to cash out your LINO points.If users are in this for the money, you can easily transfer your points to a PayPal or Bitcoin by navigating to the “Get Paid” tab found in the top-right drop-down menu. To liquidate your LINO points you’ll need a minimum of 2,000 and you’ll need to request payment at least three days before Thursday and Sunday. Users can either plug in their Bitcoin wallet address or use their email to transfer the funds to their PayPal. If you signed up for the site with a different email address than your PayPal account, you’ll either have to make another DLive account with your PayPal email address or make a new PayPal.This Spring, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, YouTube’s most popular content creator has penned a deal with DLive. Kjellberg announced that he would be doing a new weekly live stream on DLive in a YouTube video posted that has been viewed 4.6 million times. His reasons, he explained, were largely economic.He’s still got a bit of catch-up to play when it comes to his YouTube, which has more than 93 million subscribers, many who subscribe so they can tune in whenever Kjellberg streams live. While he says he won’t stop uploading his widely popular “Meme Review” videos on YouTube, Kjellberg has stated that DLive will be the exclusive place to catch his live streams for the foreseeable future.Kjellberg announces his partnership with DLive on his YouTube channel:DLive’s previous biggest name streamer was alt-right star Alex Jones, but he was recently banned for violating the platform’s hate speech guidelines.This October the project announced its partnership with Theta Network. With the infrastructure provided from Theta_Network, DLive will roll out peer-to-peer video relaying of the video content soon to its users!MTonomy: Bringing Streaming Video To EthereumBased in Cambridge, MTonomy was founded by a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Media lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, from which a number of famous Bitcoin developers have worked through, including Gavin Andresen, with advisors including Twitter and Square co-founder Dorsey. It already operates a cryptocurrency-based VoD application for consumers.It is a Netflix, Google Play, or Amazon Prime experience for Ethereum users. MTonomy went live this May.It does use Ethereum to process payments. Metadata is stored in smart contracts. To deliver a good experience, it uses the same enterprise-level servers that others use. It has encryption and Digital Rights Management protection. Content creators get the same level of protection they would elsewhere.Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Google Play accounts are frequently hacked and trafficked on the dark web. This is not an issue with the MTonomy system. Thieves would also have to compromise the Ethereum wallets of the associated accounts.MTonomy makes it possible to seamlessly track deals, intuitively search available rights, and securely host terabytes of content in the cloud to enable rapid delivery and simple management of assets. MTonomy’s user-friendly design makes the system so intuitive to use that no training or setup costs are required.The industry got its first look at the system at the Cannes Film Festival this year where Indie Rights, a global film distribution company with hundreds of features in its catalog, partnered with MTonomy.com to demonstrate the power, efficiency, and functionality of MTonomy’s unified rights, deals, and content platform.On MTonomy.com, you can use your ether (a cryptocurrency) to rent and purchase hard-to-find films, documentaries, and theatrical shows on-demand.See what you can watch today, and explore how simple it is to rent or buy films with your ether.New content is released every 24 hours on MTonomy.com for the entire year of 2019, from movies and TV shows to documentaries and digital shorts.Get involved in Slack to share your favorite content and influence what comes next to Ethereum users. See MTonomy on Twitter.LBRY: A Secure, Open, And Community-Run Digital MarketplaceEach service is rigorously peer-to-peer in giving publishers full control over their content without disintermediation by a central gateway or restriction, control or governance by the community. LBRY is typical is stating bluntly that “no party other than the publisher (including us) can unilaterally remove or block content” on its blockchain-based environment.LBRY is a protocol providing a fully decentralized network for the discovery, distribution, and payment of data. It utilizes the LBRY blockchain as a global namespace and database of digital content. Blockchain entries contain searchable content metadata, identities, and rights and access rules. The decentralized market for all digital items and content. It provides a global and censorship-resistant platform for content creators to sell their ebooks, art, music, videos, etc without the need to pay a middleman. Any content that is uploaded to the LBRY network remains accessible to the public as long as the community finds it valuable and continues to host it.Founders Jeremy Kauffman and Mike Vine wanted to decentralize the way things are shared and published throughout the internet. The two believe there is no system that services the needs of individuals by rewarding the artist directly and provides no room for improvement. The traditional organizations and platforms that provide various forms of online media from books to music and film have all monopolized the state of the market, and it’s getting harder for an artist to grow in this stagnate arena. With no point of authority, LBRY’s system gives individuals control over their media instead of being subjected to rules they never agreed to.LBRY in 100 Seconds:YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV, and other services are centralized platforms controlled by a single corporate entity. These companies have the ability to change the rules unilaterally, as well as censor content to appease authoritarian governments or corporate partners. LBRY is a decentralized, open-source protocol that is controlled by its users. LBRY facilitates a similar experience to the aforementioned services but does it in a way that is entirely decentralized. LBRY can never unilaterally change the rules on publishers or consumers, making it dramatically more trustworthy.LBRY is also different from similar blockchain projects as MaidSafe or Storj. These projects are attempting to be decentralized platforms that enable many uses, rather than a decentralized protocol designed to serve a singular purpose. LBRY is designed to do one thing and only one thing well: the discovery, access, and purchase of digital content. By being designed from the ground up for a highly specific purpose, LBRY can both deliver better performance and move faster than attempts to create a similar system on top of other decentralized platforms. All three ventures are in an early stage, so it is an open question that will achieve mainstream adoption.The project doesn’t have a whitepaper. Check out its blog. Follow LBRY on Twitter with about 40K subscribers.Flixxo: A Social Economy Based On Video SharingThe idea of creating a decentralized video distribution platform originates from Adrián Garelik, the founder of RSK Labs. He had decided to create something on top of Bitcoin for financing and distributing films, his concept was “content is a value, and content licenses are the rules tied to that value”. Adrian teamed up with Federico Abad, the creator of Popcorn Time, and with a really smart crypto expert, Pablo Carbajo. After that, they brought Javier D´Ovidio to the team and started to develop Flixxo, a decentralized and incentivized network for distributing and monetizing the video.Read the full story here.According to the Flixxo whitepaper, the project combines BitTorrent and smart contracts to create the first legal, decentralized content distribution network.Flixxo creates a P2P network where authors can distribute and monetize their own content. They incentivize the distribution of their media and remove unnecessary intermediate parties by sharing their revenues with the “seeders” — a term coined in the torrent environment that refers to those who have downloaded content, kept it on their computer and share it again with the rest of the users. Flixxo allows true end users to pay a fair price for watching licensed content in a friendly and safe environment.Flixxo is an open network, a friendly and intuitive platform, a BitTorrent client, a token and a wallet. As the network grows, so does its bandwidth and its storage space, making it more efficient and able to handle more users. The more content is being shared, the better bandwidth it will have for being distributed and streamed. The content spreads across the network, and a final user gets it from many seeders at the time. However, the payment channel is decentralized and the consumer is able to pay directly to the producer, without any intermediary party being involved. The content producer chooses whether he/she wants to share part of its earnings with the network or not, and in which conditions he/she would do that.Technology And How It WorksBy implementing Flixx (the token that carries value within the Flixxo platform) on top of a social video distribution platform they will engage users in helping improve the network by lending their storage and their bandwidth in exchange for tokens.The users will spend Flixx for consuming the content they really want to watch, and earn Flixx back for participating, for being social. Whether​ ​it​ ​was​ ​a​ ​smartphone,​ ​a​ ​tablet​ ​or​ ​a​ ​desktop​ ​computer,​ ​even​ ​a​ ​smart tv,​ ​a​ ​video​ ​distribution​ ​community​ ​could​ ​smartly​ ​use​ ​a​ ​decentralized, incentivized​ ​peer-to-peer​ ​network,​ ​having​ ​no​ ​structural​ ​costs​ ​and unlimited​ ​scaling​ ​possibilities.Users can earn more Flixx if they choose​ to watch an advertisement.This disrupting revenue flow model creates a new ecosystem in which users decide how to monetize their attention and personal information, and then transfer these earnings to the authors of the content they really enjoy. Within this model users reach the content they want to watch, authors monetize and deliver better quality content and advertisers find a way of effectively showcasing their content to their audiences.Flixxo platform started working on a private beta on June 25th, 2018, an open beta was road mapped for November 2018 and the public release took place in March 2019.Verasity: Attention-Based Platform For Video RewardsAccording to its whitepaper, Verasity aims to be a leading video platform providing unique Rewarded Player Technology to major publishers across the globe.Its patent-pending Video Rewards Player enables VRA rewards, monetization and loyalty schemes within the player wallet. Verasity’s player technology is already available to 2 million publishers with 110 billion monthly views. This brings engagement, audiences, and revenues back to publisher sites. The attention-based model creates a thriving VRA token economy between viewers, publishers, and advertisers.Every stakeholder benefits from using Verasity’s infrastructure and tools. The best part is, all that is required is that they set up an account and implement a simple line of code to turn on the Patent Pending Technology — VeraWallet. And to add to your excitement they don’t ever need to change their current video platform or workflow.Verasity has been constantly doing outreach and building partnerships since the inception of the project and now was the perfect time to accelerate the endeavors. Hence, Verasity recently partnered with BlockGroup, a consulting group for building blockchain brands and businesses, which utilizes marketing, public relations, and community development to help emerging companies build their presence in the crypto space. BlockGroup specializes in helping brands tell their stories and reach the widest audience they can globally. BlockGroup has worked with industry giants including Binance, Ethereum, Zilliqa, GSR, Kyber Network, REN, Cred, Gifto, SF Blockchain Week, and many more.Another very smart move Verasity recently did was partnering with the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IABUK) to Drive the Emerging ‘Value Exchange Economy’. This makes Verasity the first Blockchain company to have Collaboration with the global organization of interactive advertising. As part of this partnership with the IABUK, Verasity will join the IABUK’s global network, and gain access to its powerful media and advertising contacts.The current publisher-advertiser-viewer conundrum pits the viewer against advertisers, publishers, and browsers. We all know the issue: trade your privacy for the use of video platforms and watch ads. Verasity took a complicated problem and turned it on its head. Instead of creating a whole new disruptive infrastructure that moved everyone around, it is using the same old infrastructure but disrupting it from the inside. Verasity wrote code which is modules that integrate into all the main online video platforms: YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo, JWPlayer, Brightcove, Kaltura, VideoJS, Flowplayer, and Ooyala which represent over 95% of all the video players utilized.Another problem is scalability. By building on all the current online video platforms with SDK module integrations and differentiated loyalty and reward programs, Verasity will scale without any hurdles. And the quality is what you would expect from the best content delivery networks. This killer app is already available to more than 1.6 million video publishers with their own sites with 550 million users and more than 110 billion monthly views.Verasity the only platform combining the following: Decentralized Proprietary Blockchain, Proof of View (PoV) — patent-pending, Watch and Earn, Centralized Video Distribution, Staking, and multiple ways for creators and users to earn VERA tokens.According to the latest Verasity biweekly update, Q3 has been mainly focused on further improving VeraWallet’s infrastructure to support VRAB. The team has also made significant partnerships with reputable companies in the industry this quarter, including PPA, IAB, and Coinsuper. Verasity has a partnership with Binance Chain, a blockchain software system developed by Binance in a move that will bring about a new incentivized video economy. At the end of September Verasity has joined Binance Chain Alliance.Throughout the past 5 months, they’ve seen a growth in the amount of rewarded videos watched, VRA rewarded and VeraWallet registrations. They’ve also reached a staggering 12,388 DEX wallets with VRAB! The full metrics are shown below:SourceThe team continues working towards completing everything they set out in the roadmap. To see the full roadmap visit the Verasity website.DTube: Crypto-Decentralized Video Platform, Built On Top Of The STEEM Blockchain And The IPFS Peer To-Peer NetworkDTube is a decentralized streaming video platform linked to Steemit (the decentralized social media) which allows users to upload videos easily and make money (or cryptocurrency) via the upvotes or likes on their post.DTube main features:Crypto Incentive. DTube aims to become an alternative to YouTube that allows you to watch or upload videos on IPFS and share or comment about it on the immutable STEEM blockchain while earning cryptocurrency doing it.Resistant To Censorship. Because of the decentralized nature of IPFS and the STEEM blockchain, DTube is not able to censor videos, nor enforce guidelines. Only the users can censor it, through the power of their upvotes and downvotes.A Fair Platform. On DTube, there are no hidden algorithms controlling the visibility or monetization of certain videos over others. All of DTube’s data is public and can be analyzed by anyone with an internet connection.Ads Free. To deliver the best user experience DTube runs without advertising. Users remain free to advertise any product or service they would like, directly inside their own videos, at their own risk of losing their subscribers.DTube experienced instant success and soaring traction: 4 million Monthly Unique Visitors only 4 months after launch in 2018.According to the DTube whitepaper, the project has established as the DApp for video with more than:189,000 accounts created and 284,000 videos published400,000 unique visitors every day on average in 18 monthsWorld’s #2 social media DApp (after Steemit)More than $1.08 Million distributed to DTubers (in Steem tokens)Very efficient community moderationOver the last two years, 100% of the traffic came from organic sources with $0 paid traffic and drove users from all around the world.DTube market validationAfter so many months of research, development, and testing, DTube 0.9 is upgrading the concept of decentralized social media.New Features Include:Post from URL: you can now post videos and live streams from a URLFor curators: share a video from any platform on the webFor creators: double your earnings with tokens and advertisingNew blockchain: Get a DTube account and try our brand new decentralized economy on them public testnetVote on tags: tags now accounts in the tokenized monetizationPromote: burn your DTC to rank up your postsCreate your own DTube: in partnership with Steem EngineSearch engine: Search, related videos and tags navigation is fully functional againThe team designed Avalon social blockchain, a new socio-economic model for social media based on their manifest. The team built this new model on 2 principles:Re-create trust with users by leveraging the power of maturing decentralized technologiesReward users for their contributions in a fair way with cryptocurrency tokensAvalon blockchain is open-source and could be used by other projects with similar social concepts as DTube but with different types of media. It uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm similar to other popular blockchains such as BitShares, Steem, Ark or EOS.The base of this mechanism is an algorithm that creates and distributes cryptocurrency tokens to reward each participant for their contributions (posts, votes, and tags). Each of these tokens bears a utilitarian value by generating voting power (VP) and bandwidth to its holder with time; The more tokens held, the faster the resource generates.This mechanism protects Avalon from Sybil attacks (e.g.: creating multi-accounts to cheat the numbers of votes), which classic social media are victims of.1 — Bandwidth is used to write transactions on the blockchain. Each byte from the transaction is deducted from the bandwidth balance and a user is unable to transact if he doesn’t have enough bytes available.2 — Voting power is used to influence 2 things:Content exposure — Content is ranked by total voting power spent by usersRewards — Voting power impacts the number of tokens generated by the voteIn this model, influence is materialized in a token and distributed to users for their most relevant votes. The more users follow one’s vote, the more tokens one earns.DTube Coin (DTC) is a fully liquid and freely tradable crypto asset. It represents the value users can trade with each other.Voting Power (VP) is the voting token used to play the curation game. The curation game means users will spend their VP (i.e. influence) to post, vote and tag content in order to earn

the ability to copy. But soon, every industry will face the blockchain disruption -- a new paradigm where ownership of digital material can be transferred without making a copy. What will this world look like? Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin provide a clue. Without blockchain technology, Bitcoins could be counterfeited as easily as copying computer code. The critical breakthrough of blockchain technology is the use of a consensus mechanism, across multiple entities, to create an immutable, distributed ledger -- a transcript where rules can be transferred, but never altered. This is how Bitcoin allows strangers to transfer electronic cash without middlemen. Bitcoin is only one application of blockchain technology. According to one study, 15% of banks and 14% of financial market institutions intend to implement full-scale, commercial blockchain-based services this year, and those adoption rates are expected to reach 65% within three years. Meanwhile, the FDA and IBM's Watson Health are exploring ways to use blockchain to build a patient data exchange to create an audit trail of all transactions on an unalterable distributed ledger, and in the process transform the meaning of accountability and transparency in healthcare. Ad tech impact The long-term effects of blockchain on ad tech will be a topic at today's IAB Programmatic Symposium. Can blockchain address the unintentially unwieldy and opaque supply chain in ad tech? Yes. Establishing transparency and trust requires a central and secure way to record, review and execute a deal. Today, deals are typically stored in formats and locations that are disparate and nonstandard. Initially creating standards and enabling collaboration are essential steps on this path. The blockchain transformation won't happen immediately. Nor will it eliminate middlemen entirely, as long as middlemen provide services around the new transactional trust. Agencies that help clients plan and trade strategically can thrive. Nevertheless, the blockchain revolution forces us to confront a new development. To offer one example, a song that was once housed in a CD and sold only at record stores can now be distributed a billion times over with the click of a button. This is, by now, an old story, one that can be summed up in a word: Napster. We'd do well to ask ourselves what the record industry would look like today if it had been able to answer Napster's attack with blockchain technology? One positive outcome would have been an easier way to transfer value and control to artists. On the other hand, we might not have seen as many innovations in music distribution. But it's clear that the recording industry could have averted disaster and thrived in a digital world in which the right to listen was inextricably linked to the right of ownership. The point is, every industry will face a blockchain disruption that will transform the internet and our society. Facing this challenge requires cooperation because cooperation is part of blockchain's core design. Even for simple record keeping, ad tech, like the financial sector, must move thoughtfully and cooperatively toward a new standard of trust. So let's start the conversation, because the next revolution is at our door. Most Popular

director for product and R&D at IAB Tech Lab. Despite the incredible amount of attention blockchain technology has garnered in the last year, very little has been reported on the open-source licensing issues and related risks developers face when using ethereum as a foundation for their own applications. Many developers may not understand (or willfully ignore) the unique risks when utilizing open-source software. (These risks are not present in bitcoin, because the bitcoin blockchain, unlike the ethereum blockchain, is not a platform upon which developers can easily create decentralized applications using open-source code.)  The Ethereum Foundation currently utilizes a variety of open-source licenses for ethereum's different components. To make matters more complicated, the body has indicated that it has not yet selected a final open-source license on which the core of ethereum will be made available in the future. For this reason, developers of ethereum-based applications should identify, understand and address these risks and limitations. Utilization of ethereum involves a number of business and legal issues, but perhaps none are more pressing for an ethereum-based app developer than what is usually a straightforward question: what are my rights to use ethereum? The answer, it turns out, is not so simple. The Ethereum Foundation promises that ethereum "is both open-source software and Free software after the definition of the Free Software Foundation (so-called FLOSS)." In other words, licensees will generally receive broad rights to run, copy, distribute and improve the software. Beyond this basic premise, however, things get uncertain. As any seasoned open-source software developer knows, "free" software does not mean "free of restriction," neither does it necessarily mean "free of cost," though it often is. Those restrictions, which can disrupt the core of a downstream developer's business model, are particularly complicated when it comes to ethereum. Open-source software, which is premised upon the notion that every software licensee should receive a program's source code and the ability to modify the software for its own purposes, generally falls into one of two broad categories: "permissive" and "restrictive." Permissive-type licenses, which include MIT, BSD and Apache, contain minimal restrictions and grant broad rights to licensees to use and modify the covered software and to re-distribute the modifications on the licensee's own preferred terms. For commercial developers, permissive licenses are generally considered safer than restrictive licenses, because they do not run the risk of "tainting" any developments or modifications with the open-source terms of the in-licensed software. The MIT License, for instance, requires only a copyright notice, a disclaimer, and that the disclaimer and notice be passed along to any downstream licensees. A developer is free to take software that is licensed pursuant to the MIT License and to re-license any modifications or derivative works as part of a standard commercial offering. Restrictive-type licenses, or "copyleft" licenses, include the Mozilla Public License, General Public License (GPL), Lesser GPL and Affero GPL. In contrast to permissive licenses, these licenses restrict a licensee's ability to distribute modifications and derivative works under commercial or non-open-source terms. Copyleft licenses are also called "viral licenses," because they may potentially "infect" a software product with the open-source terms of the underlying copyleft program, leaving a licensee unable to distribute a modified or derivative version for a fee or in non-source form. Depending on the copyleft license, there may be ways to utilize the open-source software in a way that does not infect the overall product, and the manner of use that will trigger the terms of the viral license is often a complicated and fact-specific question. Thus, the use of open-source software, while tremendously valuable, carries levels of risk that must be parsed before in-licensing any open-source product. At the highest level of risk, a developer may jeopardize the entire proprietary value of a project. For developers seeking to understand the implications of licensing ethereum for use in their businesses, the Ethereum Foundation complicates this already sensitive issue in two ways: first, by leveraging a variety of open-source licenses for ethereum's various components; and second, by remaining indecisive as to the future licensing scheme of ethereum, particularly the ethereum core. According to the licensing section of ethereum's GitHub page, applications will be distributed under GPL, and the middleware will be made available under a version of the Affero GPL. Both licenses are restrictive in nature, and therefore limit a licensee's ability to re-license modifications or developments on commercial terms. They differ, however, in the definition of "distribution" that triggers the viral restrictions in each license. Affero's wrinkle is that remote interaction via the web is sufficient to trigger a requirement that an Affero licensee make generally available the source code of its own developments and modifications. In other words, a licensee of an Affero-covered software product might wish to make modifications or improvements to the underlying software and to make that improved product available as software-as-a-service, but in that case, the source code of the entire derivative work must be made available to users interacting with it. Obviously, this requirement is often prohibitive for a developer wishing to retain the product's proprietary value. The Ethereum Foundation explains that ethereum "is distributed under several licenses" in part "to reflect the different thinking of the minds behind different pieces of software." These conflicting views are also apparent in that the Ethereum Foundation indicates that it has not selected a final license for the core of ethereum, which includes the consensus engine, the networking code and supporting libraries. Although the Ethereum Foundation states that the "core of ethereum will be released under the most liberal of licenses," it cites the MIT License, Mozilla Public License and LGPL as the three leading candidates - the latter two of which are actually copyleft in nature (albeit generally considered to be "weak copyleft" licenses). The goal, according to the foundation, is to make the core "available for use in any commercial environment, closed or open source." To make matters more complicated, cpp-ethereum, which contains all of ethereum's core libraries, appears to be currently licensed under the GPL. Not only does this conflict with the foundation's indication that the final core licenses are undetermined, but it is not even among the options listed by the foundation for consideration. The GPL is neither a permissive license nor a "weak copyleft" one. Rather, it contains significant restrictions on downstream modification and redistribution. The current utilization of a strong copyleft license and the apparent uncertainty as to the final licensing scheme pose potentially material risks for developers. Until the final license is determined, developers of ethereum-based applications are subject to any shifts or divisions in the philosophy behind the licensing of ethereum - a philosophy the Ethereum Foundation freely admits already contains rifts among the various stakeholders. None of this is to say that developers should not utilize ethereum or that the Ethereum Foundation is doing anything wrong in its approach. Rather, commercial developers need to understand the complications of open-source licensing and the unique wrinkles in the context of ethereum. The downside of underestimating or misjudging the risks is far too great. Coder's monument image via Shutterstock The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. EthereumIntellectual PropertyCopyright Indonesia's Central Bank Mulls Bitcoin Payments Ban Australia's CommBank Plans to Issue a Bond on the Blockchain rcel.id = 'rc_' + Math.floor(Math.random() * 1000); rcel.type = 'text/javascript'; Mar 22, 2018 at 01:01 | Rachel Rose O'Leary Polkadot's Plan for Governing a Blockchain of Blockchains Blockchain governance is getting a shake-up by a forthcoming blockchain created by one of the co-founders of ethereum. Ethereum and Stellar? Kik's Kin Token to Use Two Chains While Kik said it would move its "kin" crypto tokens off ethereum and onto stellar, today it announced it was allowing the tokens to live on both. Mar 20, 2018 at 21:05 | Annaliese Milano A16z, USV Lead $12 Million Funding for CryptoKitties CryptoKitties will break away from its developer, Axiom Zen, after raising $12 million of venture capital. Mar 20, 2018 at 13:00 | Omkar Godbole Below $500? Ether Price Seeks Floor After 40% Drop Ether's long-term price floor looks to have dropped to $300, courtesy of a bearish head-and-shoulders breakdown.