Advertising blockchain startup Lucidity today announced that Pithia Inc. has joined as a strategic investor to further the development of the company’s blockchain platform.

Founded in 2017, Lucidity is developing a platform that aims to tackle issues in programmatic advertising such as data discrepancies, fraud and a general lack of transparency. It hopes to do that by improving the authenticity of digital advertising analytics through a neutral decentralized shared ledger.

The company’s blockchain protocol is said to empower marketers to resolve data discrepancies so billing is faster, fraud is prevented by flagging fake traffic sources, waste is identified and campaigns are optimized for performance.

“Collaborating with Pithia supports Lucidity’s mission to build the most scalable and interoperable Layer 2 blockchain infrastructure to solve for pressing issues in the digital ad supply chain,” Sam Kim, chief executive officer of Lucidity, said in a statement. “Our product is live and now we are even better positioned to innovate and handle a massive volume of transactions, reduce blockchain overhead costs and ensure privacy for our customers.”

Advertising fraud is a serious problem. As SiliconANGLE reported back in April, the digital advertising industry is believed to have seen advertisers spend $229.25 billion during 2017, according to Statista, and fraud is estimated cost of $19 billion in 2018 or 9 percent of total digital advertising spend, according to Juniper Research Ltd.

Lucidity’s platform tracks and authenticates transactions between advertisers and publishers in a tamperproof and auditable format that is shared among multiple parties. With this platform, the company said, 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.

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.

Kim spoke to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, at this week’s Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto:

Image: Lucidity