Blockchain-powered Ad Exchange AdEx Releases Beta, Meeting its Next Milestone

Advertising exchange platform AdEx has released its beta on February 26th. Among other improvements, the release offers accessible UI for publishers to list their ad inventory on the platform and advertisers to bid for the listed ad slots and submit their ads.

The platform’s core is an Ethereum-based advertising marketplace that has already been tested out in the real sector. Earlier the project has reached a partnership with the global travel media provider Ink and conducted world’s first blockchain-driven ad auction, selling 1 million advertising spaces onboarding tickets.

Fortunately enough, the project has chosen simplicity and accessibility over the bells and whistles offered by a number of projects attempting to get in the niche of blockchain-driven advertising. The team has also developed its second generation of smart contracts, allowing bids to persist as off-chain signed messages until accepted. Such an improvement alone will provide greater scalability potential, which is additionally reinforced by specific smart contract architecture compatible with second-layer scaling solutions. The official release announcement states that the new approach also opens up wider integration opportunities, mentioning Metamask and hardware wallets Trezor and Ledger.

It should be mentioned that AdEx beta was expected to be released ahead of schedule in October 2017, but the company has opted for building a yet better product and reverted to the initial schedule. Considering that typically projects try to please the audience rushing undercooked products to the market, this wasn’t, in fact, an unwise decision. As the company itself puts it in its blog post:

“At that point, we made the decision to stick to our original release date for the benefit of a superior decentralized app. We knew that a part of our community would be disappointed but our choices have always been directed by scalability, efficiency and user experience.” — AdEx Blog.

Yet, the steps are taken, in turn, let the team spice up the beta release with the improvements not meant to be anticipated before 2019 with the AdEx V.2. Therefore, the project is still well on its course, optimizing the whole year-long development stretch. It’s safe to say that shortly advertisers and publishers will be able to figure out for themselves if the tradeoff was worth it. In this regard, the team has expressed commitment to respond to users’ feedback and tweak the product accordingly.

Earlier in mid-2017 AdEx has successfully distributed 40,008 ETH worth of tokens, showing surprisingly steady price dynamics. The project also has a significant list of partnerships within blockchain industry and beyond, including the aforementioned Ink, NEO, Wings platform, Fintech Blockchain Group, Snip, AdHive, and others. As for the future plans, the project aims to further explore scaling options, add more ad types, such as video and interactive ads, and work on its SDK for mobile platforms.