By Hunter Gebron, Director of Strategic Initiatives at MetaX
A brief recap of our journey to the Ethereum Mainnet and where we’re heading.
The road to launching the first token-curated registry on the Ethereum Mainnet was long and winding and has taken us through all types of terrain. Here is a brief recap of some (but not nearly all) of our adventures along the way.
Our journey begins on the open plateau of the conceptual landscape where fresh ideas began to take shape. In this stage, we wrote our white paper and began to formalize what came to be a new cryptoeconomic primitive called Token-Curated Registries (TCR’s.)
5/31/17
White Paper published
From there a steep incline took us up to the token launch event. At the top of that summit, our goal was reached, and we successfully distributed 500 million adToken (ADT) into the hands of a global community.
6/26/17
adToken Launch Event concluded
With funding secured and a clear vision of what to build next, the engineers began coding at breakneck speed. After many miles, the joint MetaX and ConsenSys adChain team were finally able to pull into a rest area and deploy their code to the Rinkeby Testnet. The adToken Lunarscape was a soft launch of the adChain Registry smart contracts on the Testnet and enabled the community to get their hands on what we had been laboriously working on post token launch.
11/1/17
The adChain Publisher Registry smart contracts were deployed to the Rinkeby Testnet
The glow of the community cityscape could now be seen on the horizon. We hosted numerous meetups and events including two at the Microsoft Technology Center in New York, and we embarked on a publicity campaign that resulted in MetaX/adChain being featured in some of the most prominent publications in the world.
11/27/17
First event at Microsoft Technology Center
But for the engineers, it was already time to gas up and hit the pavement again. This time their sights were set on the Emerald City of the Ethereum Mainnet and their foot was pedal to the metal all the way until April 23, 2018, when the release candidate for the adChain Publisher Registry officially went live.
4/23/18
The adChain Registry Publisher Release Candidate goes live
So where are we now?
Welcome to Life on the Mainnet
If the Ethereum Mainnet is the Emerald City, then the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz (after he is revealed to be not so great or powerful) is the underwhelming transaction times and poor user experience the Mainnet currently has to offer.
The adChain engineers are working on various hacks to alleviate the slow transaction wait times to the degree that they can. But we are still at the mercy of a global blockchain that is only as fast as the slowest node on the network. Scalability tradeoffs, what can you do?
Fortunately for us, the Ethereum foundation realizes that scalability, along with the transition to proof of stake, is their number one priority and are working tirelessly on first layer solutions like sharding, and second layer solutions like Plasma.
Launching the adChain Publisher Registry on the Mainnet is an essential step for us, but it is not the last. We are currently working on building out an infrastructure to enable advertising operations (Ad Ops) professionals to provide detailed analytics about publisher domains and to house that information in the adChain Publisher Registry UI. This would make the Registry more actionable for the digital advertising industry and would give adToken (ADT) holders more detailed information about domains to help guide them during the curation process.
But the Emerald City of the Mainnet is merely one destination on the map, and we have many more places that we want to visit. We have some exciting things in store for the rest of 2018 and moving into 2019.
Looking Beyond: aDS and the Advertiser Registry
Featured above is our recently published six-month roadmap. It reveals our next significant joint initiative with ConsenSys; The adChain Decentralized Server (aDS) — a Peer-to-Peer Bidder and Ad Server that supports cryptocurrency payment and settlement.
For aDS to work correctly, it needs to be facilitated by a two-sided marketplace. So in late Q3 2018, we are rolling out the Advertiser Registry, a token-curated registry for advertisers. Once it’s live, publishers from the adChain Publisher Registry and advertisers from the Advertiser Registry will be able to buy and sell ad placements through the adChain Decentralized Server (aDS) peer-to-peer.
aDS will be a revolutionary way for digital ad placements to be bought and sold using the blockchain. With the gateway for gaining access to the aDS marketplace being the Advertiser and Publisher Token-Curated Registries (TCR’s).
Open Collaboration in Ethereum
One of the most exciting aspects of being an Ethereum based initiative is the amount of open collaboration and camaraderie amongst different projects in the space.
Our Airswap integration is a prime example of this. Airswap is a decentralized marketplace for purchasing cryptocurrency which allows users from within our Dapp to buy adToken (ADT) at the click of a button.
We are also leveraging GovernX to provide users with email updates about the relevant actions taking place in the Publisher Registry. Users can opt to receive updates daily if they choose.
You can expect to see more collaborations as we work to expand the adChain Advertiser and Publisher Registries in Q3 and Q4.
That’s all for now! Stay tuned for more updates and announcements. We have a lot planned for the rest of 2018.
