Lucidity Releases Yellow Paper Describing A Scalable, Sidechain Implementation for Programmatic Advertising
The Lucidity white paper makes our business case. It describes the problems we address in our industry and the technology we’ve developed to solve those problems. In short, it is the “idea” behind the company — our reason for existing.
To act as the technical companion to our whitepaper, we’re thrilled to announce the public release of the Lucidity yellow paper. Whereas our white paper describes the “what” and “why” of our company, our yellowpaper provides the all-important “how.”
Written by CTO/Co-Founder Miguel Morales and Lead Protocol Engineer Alexander Voloshko, our yellow paper describes in detail how we’ve implemented a scalable, sidechain solution for the purpose of measuring advertising metrics and enforcing agreed-upon standards.
Digital advertising is rife with inconsistent measuring and reporting, causing data discrepancies, delayed payments, fraud, and a general lack of trust and transparency. While there is an endless array of problems you could solve with the Lucidity protocol, it’s our specific implementation of that protocol (via our sidechain) that allows us to solve the above problems for digital advertising.
Our yellow paper describes this implementation, specifically detailing our sidechain architecture, registries, fund management, sharding, and token economics.
What Do You Mean By a “Sidechain Solution”?
In order to develop a solution that has the functionality, scalability, and speed required to solve for programmatic advertising, we needed to build technology on top of an existing blockchain — in this case, the Ethereum blockchain.
This method is becoming more and more common, and is often referred to as “Layer 2” technology. As Michael J. Casey described it for Coindesk:
“In mitigating the heavy, multi-party computation that blockchains carry while ensuring that transaction histories are at some point anchored by ‘on-chain’ consensus algorithms, there’s something of a best-of-both-worlds promise in these ideas.”
The “best-of-both worlds” notion here is exactly right. With native blockchain solutions, the more decentralized the network is (in other words, the more verifiers you have tracking and computing the data), the more processing power is required which slows the entire network down.
For programmatic advertising, that’s bad. Programmatic advertising generates millions of transactions per second. In order to verify all those transactions in real-time, our solution needs to scale at a much faster rate than native Ethereum.
Building a Sidechain to Match the Scale and Speed of Programmatic
Our sidechain was built to match the scale and speed of programmatic. Through sharding, we’re able to effectively partition our sidechain to decrease the computational burden on individual verifiers. Through our Plasma implementation, we’re able to ensure our sidechain remains protected from attacks or faulty shards. All of this work is built on top of Ethereum, which creates and enforces consensus amongst the disparate sets of data our system ingests. Much of this is processed off-chain, and then the merkle root is written on chain to act as a fingerprint.
The end result is a sidechain that is scalable, decentralized, and economically protected against inaccurate, discrepant data and malicious attempts to manipulate that data.
To learn exactly how we’ve done this, we encourage you to read our newly released yellow paper. And because our yellow paper can get rather technical, we also encourage you to follow up with any questions on our Telegram channel. We have experts (including the guys that wrote it) ready to answer whatever you might throw at them.
Originally published at lucidity.tech on June 6, 2018.
