The world of digital advertising is a dirty place, and advertising blockchain ledger company Lucidity wants to help clean it up. To do that, the company today announced the public launch of its marketing analytics platform based on the Ethereum blockchain.

Formerly known as KR8OS Inc., Lucidity was founded in 2017 by Chief Executive Officer Sam Kim, Chief Technology Officer Miguel Morales and President Sam Goldberg with the intent to build a decentralized, tamperproof advertising solution.

“Our vision is to bring total, indisputable transparency to the digital advertising supply chain,” Kim said. “We are inviting partners to join us so the honest players in our industry can get the benefits they deserve. Blockchain presents an opportunity to solve a major industry problem. We are successfully operating a powerful protocol and are building game-changing apps on top of it.”

The internet advertising industry is fraught with a certain amount of fraud and lack of authenticity including fraudulent impressions, attribution theft, domain spoofing, ad stacking and similar.

As a global market, the digital advertising industry is believed to have seen advertisers spend $229.25 billion during 2017, according to Statistica. Types of fraud, such as listed above, had an estimated cost of $19 billion in 2018 or approximately 9 percent of total digital advertising spend, according to Juniper Research Ltd.

With the power of Lucidity’s platform, Kim believes that advertising problems can be cleaned up.

Using a distributed digital ledger called a blockchain it is possible to track and authenticate transactions between advertisers and publishers. These transactions are stored in a tamperproof and auditable format that is shared between multiple parties. With this protocol, advertisers can be much more certain of the legitimacy of publisher activity and publishers can validate their own identity and transparently prove the value of their own platform.

“This is the core function and output of the Lucidity protocol: an accurate measurement of marketing data free of discrepancies and fraud,” said Kim.

On the back end, Lucidity’s platform is built on the Ethereum blockchain, the second most popular blockchain in the world at $40.4 billion. Ethereum is built as a resource for business operations by completely implementing smart contracts, a computer protocol that allows two parties to define a set of rules that must be satisfied before currency changes hands.

The adoption of blockchain technology for digital advertisements is somewhat recent, although the technology has been popularized by the 2009 launch of Bitcoin. In 2017, MetaX launched its own solution, adChain, in partnership with blockchain software company ConsenSys. In June, media titans Comcast Corp., NBCUniversal, Walt Disney Co., Cox Communications and others joined together to build a blockchain platform for television premium advertising.

Advertisers and publishers using Lucidity can use a number of supported advertising platforms including DoubleClick, Adelphic, Rubicon Project, MoPub, AppNexus and BeesWax.

Lucidity is a member of IAB Tech Lab’s Blockchain Working Group, the Enterprise Ethereum Association and Hyperledger, a collaborative blockchain project hosted by The Linux Foundation.

Image: Lucidity