The AdEx Platform is built on top of
The AdEx Protocol
The AdEx protocol facilitates trading of advertising space or time, as well as the subsequent verification and proof that it actually occurred. Essentially, it covers all interactions between publishers, advertisers and end users. The protocol combines traditional peer-to-peer technology, cryptography and blockchain.
How AdEx actually Works
The protocol combines traditional peer-to-peer technology, cryptography and blockchain.
The AdEx protocol is designed to be completely invisible to end users, while improving their internet browsing experience. However, under the hood there is a complex system of software components working together. For a complete overview of the protocol, head straight to our GitHub Repo.
1Core
The AdEx protocol builds on top of blockchain technology to facilitate the parts that need achieving consensus in a trustless, decentralized manner. This part is commonly referred as the “AdEx Core”. The Core has to implement everything related to moving funds between advertisers and publishers. To be more precise, it provides an implementation of OUTPACE channels (unidirectional payment channel), and every advertiser’s campaign maps to one OUTPACE channel with a certain deposit.
2Market
The market is a RESTful service maintained and hosted by AdEx Network OÜ. The primary role of the market is to facilitate demand/supply discovery and trading. It keeps record of all campaigns that are currently valid, and allows publishers/advertisers to query that list in order to find what they need.
3SDK
The SDK runs in an <iframe> in the end user’s browser and builds a profile of the user and learns about them through the publishers and advertisers. Everyone who integrates the SDK has the ability to “tell” the SDK what they know. The incentive for this is built-in: better targeted ads mean higher revenues for publishers and higher ROI for advertisers.
4Validators
Validators - One advertising campaign is mapped to a single payment channel, where the deposit is the entire campaign budget, and the validators are normally an advertiser-side and a publisher-side agents. Campaigns are regarded as valid only if ⅔ of the validators have signed the reported traffic generated on the publisher’s platform.
5Platform
The platform is the GUI of the AdEx platform. Advertisers and Publishers submit and accept campaigns, choose validators and access stats for their campaigns on the platform.
6Registry
The Registry is an autonomous system designed to provide a list of publicly accessible validators that you can nominate for your campaign. The ultimate goal of the Registry is provide exposure for everyone who wants to be a public validator, and also to hold these validators accountable if they misbehave.
Scalability in mind: Unidirectional payment channels
Off-chain unidirectional trustless payment channels
Payment channels refers to a set of techniques/methods for enabling multiple payments between parties without committing each payment to the blockchain. For AdEx, using payment channels has a few important benefits. Firstly, it allows us to minimize the number of on-chain transactions, and that’s is a huge UX improvement. In the v4 version of our protocol, the only on-chain transactions that you need are opening a campaign (as an advertiser) and withdrawing your earnings (as a publisher). Secondly, because making payments does not incur any extra fees, we can use micropayments for each individual impression (or any other type of payable event).
AdEx CEO Ivo Georgiev explains trustless payment channels for developers and hackers attending ETHParis
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