Adshares is an exciting and novel blockchain project that inaugurated a radically reconfigured business strategy in May of this year. As you can see from the chart below the revamp has been a huge success, the price of the ADS token rising something like 8,000% in the last 12 months.
So what's all the fuss about and what exactly is Adshares?
Adshares is an ad network. These are quite commonplace (with Google Ads being the most well known) whereby a publisher chooses a selection of ads from an advertiser to run on their website. Publishers are very often as small as an individual running a website or blog. In practice, however, internet ad networks often place strict requirements on campaign size and minimum purchase quotas (this is the reason most people use Google Ads). Adshares has the potential to really open up the internet ads market, so long monopolised by leading tech firms, to internet users. It's another instance of decentralisation making the market more efficient.
Adshares is different in that it is the first 100% decentralised ad network. It runs on its own blockchain - the Enterprise Service Chain. The ESC blockchain is fast (Adshares claim potential speeds beyond 1 million transfers per second), charges very low transaction commissions, uses the underlying ADS token as a payment ecosystem and further encourages open-source development of Adservers.
The diagrammatic chart above shows how streamlined and relatively simple this advertiser (creates ads) - publisher (shows ads) - user (clicks on ads) economy can be be. Adshares is a programmatic advertising platform. Ad specifics such as banner size, ad placement, duration and genre classification are set by advertisers and selected by publishers in the Adshares website application (see below). The application is straight-forward and easy to use. The Adshares token (ADS) is used as the only currency for the ads marketplace. The ESC blockchain enables such programmatic advertising to function as a decentralised and open marketplace or network.
However commendable the idea of a decentralised market for advertising is, much of the success of the project must go down to the underlying robust nature of the ESC blockchain. The team of developers behind Adshares - BioInfoBank - have clearly been working on development of this blockchain for many years. It uses a DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) algorithm for consensus selection of blocks. DPoS has economic and environmental advantages (faster and cheaper; requires less work) to other consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Work.
On that last point while the ESC blockchain is currently used for its stability and speed, Adshares has long term plans to provide cross-chain solutions. As such, wrapped versions of ADS have been listed on Binance Smart Chain (Pancake Swap), Ethereum (Uniswap) and Polygon (QuickSwap) since the relaunch in May 2021. A recent listing of the ADS token on the centralised Changelly PRO exchange is a further landmark step in how far Adshares has come in a short time.
Positives to glean from the Adshares documentation include a commitment to open source technology (the software is hosted on GitHub) and to decentralisation in the internet advertising market. With the monopolies that Google Ads and Facebook have in this economic sphere there is a sizeable use case for change. Adoption of the ADS blockchain system with its low costs, ease of use and scalability is increasing.
The team behind Adshares (ADS) have been extremely busy in 2021, making a noise with a series of strategically effective marketing campaigns. In August a Premium Publishers and Advertisers program was launched, allocating grants to media platforms for utilising the Adshares program (Publish0x being one such media service). Adshares Social was a further interesting development a month later whereby Twitter users could be rewarded in ADS tokens for sharing posts (see here for further details). The Adshares team is rapidly expanding, seeking "more listings, more partnerships, more people in the team, more conferences and much more decentralised advertising!"
Adshares claims that "anyone can make their own Adserver by implementing open-source blockchain tools in more and more areas." Hence perhaps the current focus on expansion into the metaverse. Understandably this open source technology, shared and developed, seems a good fit for development in this unchartered area.
End-user adoption has to be the aim of aspiring blockchain projects and Adshares seems dedicated to expanding its reach to token stakers, publishers and advertisers alike. The online ads industry may be particularly open to transformation by a blockchain network given the problems it has with ad fraud. With the ADS block explorer, Adshares provides a verifiable record of views, clicks and impressions ensuring an advertiser can track delivery of an ad.
Adshares is an exciting and ambitious umbrella project that is ultimately concerned with maintaining the decentralised Adshares network. It has a bit of vision behind it. Just look at the roadmap of achievements already implemented.
Years of work have gone into the ESC blockchain and the infrastructure for adservers running on top of it. The documentation and open source community development around the project both look strong. Like all good internet projects there's much to explore on the Adshares website and the accompanying GitHub hosting the project's code.
Decentralisation offers promise to an internet in need of more openness, fairness and data protection. We're really beginning to see exciting projects and ideas developing which incorporate the decentralised structure of the blockchain. Adshares is just one such project but it combines a spirited marketing approach with a core ethos of decentralisation. With forward-thinking ideas, open source code and the foundation of a super-efficient blockchain dedicated to the ad network there's a lot to like about the Adshares project.
