AdEx Update — May 17, 2019
Take a look at what we’ve accomplished in the past month. We’ve been quite busy, indeed.
PLATFORM & PROTOCOL UPDATES
Stremio integration: The new version of the AdEx platform is now integrated with our first large publisher Stremio. This means that AdEx ads are now broadcast to an audience of 7+ million users across the globe.
AdEx adview manager released: The adview manager enables two major AdEx features: contextual targeting and header bidding.
Contextual targeting is advertising on a website that is relevant to the page’s content. It’s a great fit for AdEx as it is non-disruptive, doesn’t require the invasion of the target audience’s privacy for proper targeting, and enhances the overall user experience online, among other reasons. We will publish a separate blogpost explaining this soon, so stay tuned.
Header bidding is an advanced programmatic mechanism that allows us to pull all the available demand in the browser. Again, a detailed article on it is to follow.
The AdEx adview also allows for easier embedding/integration of AdEx: it’s now possible to integrate AdEx without using iframes, easier, and much more practical to integrate the Adview into a React/Angular web app.
More info here: https://github.com/adexnetwork/adex-adview-manager.
Validator stack: The AdEx validator stack v0.5 is almost done and undergoing peer review. Here are some of the most significant changes here, along with the GitHub issue/PR numbers:
- Safety/reliability improvements (#87, #118, #111, #135, #139, #145, many others)
- Rate limits (#136, #21, #131)
- Can process more channels (#104, #127)
- Performance improvements ( — cluster mode for Sentry, #148, #149)
- Benchmarking suite which allows you to measure performance (#2, #147)
We found that a single-process Sentry can process up to 2000 impressions per second on an average MacBook, which is a good start!
New platform version: We have released AdEx v4.0 on mainnet. This new version of the AdEx platform is significantly different from the previous one as it is based on the newly developed AdEx protocol.
The biggest highlight is the improved UX — rather than having to manage ad bids by hand, you just open a campaign and let AdEx do the rest!
We’ve also introduced Quick Accounts, which allows users to sign-up without Metamask/Trezor/Ledger.
Currently, the AdEx platform is open to grant winners only but we will open it to the general public soon.
Once we roll it out to the general public, you will still be able to access beta.adex.network in order to migrate your account!
AdEx around the world
At the end of April, our team attended Toronto Blockchain Week. There we had the chance to speak to many blockchain enthusiasts and buidlers in the space about AdEx, and gave a short demo of our platform to an assembled crowd.
At the beginning of May, we took part in IAB’s event “Adtech in blockchain: It’s working!” in New York City. The forum got together representatives of ad tech, marketing and blockchain to discus the current levels of intersection between these industries. Our team had a chance to demo a version of the AdEx Platform (on testnet) and participated in a panel discussion on how we can better incorporate blockchain for advertising.
Team growth
We are looking to grow the team by adding a talented front-end developer. If you are one or you know someone who’d be a good , give us a shout — we’d love to hear from you.
