The protocol was used by over-the-top (OTT) ad solutions companies MadHive and Beachfront to address three widespread problems in the digital advertising industry: fraud, transparency and consumer privacy. The open-source technology delivers digital signatures into OpenRTB protocol to identify illegitimate ad supply, create a verifiable chain of custody, and create mechanisms for data access and validation for the digital advertising industry. For the initial test, MadHive served as the demand-side platform (DSP) partner acting on behalf of advertisers and Beachfront acted as the supply-side (SSP) partner representing networks.
Early findings showed that CryptoRTB’s digital signatures identified and eliminated domain spoofing, a predominant method of fraudsters and which some sources calculate led to $23 billion of fraud in 2019. CryptoRTB’s digital signatures disintermediate industry middlemen.
“With so much television spend moving to digitally delivered formats like OTT, it’s becoming even more critical to solve the underlying problems with the digital ecosystem,” said Christiana Cacciapuoti, executive director at AdLedger. “CryptoRTB can remedy these problems across all platforms and screens, including OTT, which is an increasingly important part of the marketing mix.”
“The e-commerce industry has been utilising cryptography to ensure trust, transparency and security for decades, and now we’re leveraging the technology with blockchain to remedy the problems in digital advertising,” added Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive and project lead at MAD Network. “In addition to providing the verification methods needed for a more efficient supply chain, CryptoRTB is built with privacy as a core tenet to ensure a mutually beneficial future for advertisers, publishers and consumers.”
