AdChain: Decentralized Header Bidding

Abstract

Due to the involvement of multiple intermediaries without trusted parties, lack of proper regulations, and a complicated supply chain, ad impression discrepancy affects online advertising. This issue causes up to $82 billion annual revenue loss for honest parties. The loss can be significantly reduced with a precise and trusted decentralized mechanism. This paper presents AdChain, a decentralized, distributed, and verifiable solution that detects and minimizes online advertisement impression discrepancies. AdChain establishes trust by employing multiple independent agents to receive and record log-level data, along with a consensus protocol to validate each ad data. AdChain is scalable, efficient, and compatible with the current infrastructure. Our experimental evaluation, using over half a million ad data points, identifies system parameters that achieve 98% accuracy, reducing the ad discrepancy rate from 20% to 2%. Our cost analysis shows that active nodes on AdChain can generate profits comparable to miners on major blockchain networks like Bitcoin.