Re-post ICO Analysis: adToken
adChain is an ethereum based solution for digital advertising. It is mainly intended to fix the fraudulent environment of online advertising namely bot traffic, malvertisements, trackers, spoofed domains, lack of coordination and systemic fraud.
Online advertising is mostly paid by the number of impressions of their ads. Bots which mimic human traffic is indistinguishable from real traffic. This results in a less than effective ads for the advertisers. Recently, P&G pulled 1 billion dollars from their digital ad spend budget.
It’s said in the adToken Whitepaper:
Ad buyers are increasingly frustrated by having their money stolen. While programmatic ad buying is undoubtedly the path forward for quantifying the value of ad buys relative to direct dealing and is the highest growth area of digital advertising, programmatic is, at present, a morass for quantifying efficacy in advertising non-installable goods. The behaviors of humans on web pages are easily mimicked by bots and the flagging of bot network signatures is essentially a cat and mouse game. This leaves advertisers mostly powerless against the incentive structure of the downstream supply chain.
The team behind the adToken plans to solve this problem in 3 steps:
- The adChain Registry. This is a smart contract in the ethereum blockchain which maintains the list of non-fraudulent publishers.
- adToken Holders. adToken holders have the are incentivised to vote out fraudulent publishers from the registry.
- As long as the adChain registry is clean, this becomes of value to the advertisers and thus directly benefiting the adToken holders.
How will the coins be distributed?
There will be a total of 1 billion adTokens (ADT).
10% is sold during pre-sale
50% will be distributed in the ICO.
20% will reserved for MetaX
20% will reserved for ConsenSys
Below is a chart on how the proceeds will be allocated:
The team behind adChain?
The team is composed of ConsenSys and MetaX. Mike Goldin, who works full-time at ConsenSys is the creator of successful smart contract called Ujo Music.
Miguel Morales works at MetaX and has worked at two other software-focused firms in the past. He wrote a tutorial regarding interactive bid requests. https://medium.com/zerox-inc/interactive-bid-requests-w-apache-druid-6e4c231410c0
In the advisory role, Shailin Dhar and Raleigh Harbour have great experience in digital advertising. Dhar is the author of "UnCommon Sense for AdTech", an influential paper on digital advertising; while Harbour, formerly worked at AOL and pioneered the industry.
How to participate in the ICO?
The ICO will go live on June 26, 9am Pacific Time. 500 million tokens will be distributed. Each token price is 0.00006666666666667 Ether. This means that the company aims to raise around US$12 million in this ICO.
The website for the ICO is: https://adtoken.com/token/
Analysis and Conclusion
The team behind the adToken has lots of experience with great names in the advisory board. I believe that this ICO will be successful and more likely you will earn money in the short term.
In the long term, how much you will earn will depend on the success of the adoption by the advertisers. This will be a great challenge as it will have to compete with Google and Facebook for digital advertising dollars.
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