AdChain: Decentralized Header Bidding

Due to the involvement of multiple intermediaries without trusted intermediaries, lack of proper regulations, and a complicated supply chain, ad impression discrepancy plagues online advertising. This issue accounts for up to $82B of annual revenue loss for the honest parties. This loss can be significantly reduced if there is a precise and trusted decentralized mechanism. This paper presents AdChain, a decentralized, distributed, and verifiable solution that detects and minimizes online advertisement impression discrepancy rate. AdChain aims to establish trust by acquiring multiple independent agents that receive and record log-level data and a consensus protocol that determines the validity of each ad data. AdChain is scalable, efficient, and compatible with the current infrastructure. Our experimental evaluation on over half a million ad data points discovers systems parameters to achieve an accuracy of 98% to decrease the ad discrepancy rate from up to 20% to 2%. Our cost analysis shows that, on average, active nodes on AdChain can generate a profit comparable to miners on main Blockchain networks like Bitcoin.