AdChain: Decentralized Header Bidding

Abstract

Due to the involvement of multiple intermediaries without trusted parties, lack of proper regulations, and a complicated supply chain, ad impression discrepancy affects online advertising. This issue causes up to $82 billion annual revenue loss for honest parties. The loss can be significantly reduced with a precise and trusted decentralized mechanism. This paper presents AdChain, a decentralized, distributed, and verifiable solution that detects and minimizes online advertisement impression discrepancies. AdChain establishes trust by employing multiple independent agents to receive and record log-level data, along with a consensus protocol to validate each ad data. AdChain is scalable, efficient, and compatible with the current infrastructure. Our experimental evaluation, using over half a million ad data points, identifies system parameters that achieve 98% accuracy, reducing the ad discrepancy rate from 20% to 2%. Our cost analysis shows that active nodes on AdChain can generate profits comparable to miners on major blockchain networks like Bitcoin.

Being published at MARBLE 2024 (The 5th International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy)