(In Al's Artist's Bedroom, Van Gogh)

The Internet is a new media, it can not only have display ads, as television, radio, newspapers and magazines can do, it can also have a data-based service, according to the target population for more accurate delivery, it will record the user's browsing behavior, search behavior, social relations, etc., thereby predicting the user's preferences and needs.

The Internet's digital advertising service has greatly squeezed the space of television, radio, newspapers and magazines and other media, and it has undoubtedly won.

John Wernermek's classic phrase "I know half of the advertising bill is wasted, but I don't know which half is wasted", almost everyone knows. Embarrassingly, a hundred years on, the problem remains.

The inability to be transparent is the irony of digital advertising itself

With news portals, search engines, social networks, instant messaging, intelligent information and other Internet products gradually landing, the entire digital advertising service annual revenue of more than 200 billion U.S. dollars, which is a very large industry.

The advent of the Internet has really given us some better marketing tools, both when launched and when measuring effectiveness. For example, the delivery can select the region, user consumption level, interest preferences, etc. , when measuring can see ROI returns and other data. But problems remain with this huge industry, and there is still a lack of transparency across the industry.

As ordinary users, often in the website, mobile phone applications, text messages, app reminders, information flow and other places to see ads. However, whether in search engines, social networks, or in many small and medium-sized websites or applications to serve ads, is not simply advertisers and publishers directly cooperate so simple, there are advertising alliances, demand platforms, technical service providers, advertising agencies and so on.

For example, in the information client to do an information flow ads, advertisers may need to find the right information client advertising agency to discuss the annual price, signed a contract, will also involve how to run ads, is their own delivery, or by the agent to help run, the time of delivery, the location of delivery, the content of the run need to be constantly optimized, otherwise ROI is difficult to increase, the effect of the measurement can often only be compared between different platforms.

All in all, there's a lot of opacity in digital advertising, even though there's been an improvement in automation. The reason is simple: all ad campaigns run, advertisers don't have direct access to source code data, and all performance measurements come from vendor reports. Each supplier measures it differently. That is, it's hard to really verify the truth as a customer. For example, some search engines pay for links are paid per click, as advertisers, sometimes it is difficult to understand whether this is the real user's click or non-real user's click. This increases advertisers' marketing costs.

According to statistics, advertising fraud cost $16.4 billion worldwide in 2017 alone. Advertising fraud can take many forms, such as click fraud and domain name spoofing. Because of the pay-per-click calculation model, there is a problem with fake clicks. Domain name spoofing is by impersonating domain names and luring real users to non-real websites, such as santeIment.com and santaiment.com, which may be treated as the same site if users don't distinguish carefully.

In addition, small and medium-sized websites and applications access advertising alliance, as a publisher, it is difficult to determine that the ad network click data must be true and accurate.

In addition, due to differences in data statistics for digital advertising services, final billing takes longer and the overall process is lengthy and cumbersome.

All in all, today's advertising marketers have more technical tools available and more ways to assess ROI, but transparency is still not guaranteed and data fraud remains a problem.

This is far from the really ideal digital advertising marketing, how to solve the classic problems mentioned a hundred years ago?

The advent of blockchain gives people hope of solving problems. Lucidity tries to solve opaque problems through blockchain technology, solve advertising fraud, give advertisers better ROI returns, and give premium publishers more benefits.

It's worth noting that Lucidity, unlike other digital advertising blockchain projects, didn't try to refactor the entire digital advertising system from the start, but instead adopted a progressive, balanced approach. Lucidity provides a foundational protocol for the entire digital advertising ecosystem that does not need to change the current delivery process and collaboration model, but can lead to transparent results.

This is very helpful for the actual landing. So, how does it work?

Data transparency provides an increase in ROI

One of the biggest problems with digital advertising that the Lucidity protocol tries to address is data transparency. The overall architecture of the Lucidity protocol is as follows:

The bottom layer is the Taifang blockchain, which records transaction data and executes smart contracts. Lucidity protocols are protocols built on the Ethereum blockchain, primarily to validate auditable data sets. At the top is the Lucidity application layer, which is used to build a variety of digital advertising service applications based on the Lucidity protocol.

Lucidity protocols track, validate, and ultimately reach consensus on ad data for entire digital ad participants through smart contracts. At the heart of the Lucidity protocol is the creation of a rule that accurately measures marketing data to address discrepies or fraud in the data. On top of the Lucidity protocol, you can create apps for advertisers and publishers, and because the Lucidity protocol is open source, anyone can create their own apps on the protocol.

The Lucidity protocol, which connects the various roles of the entire digital advertising ecosystem, has the opportunity to address the opaqueness of data across the industry as long as everyone adopts the Lucidity protocol. Lucidity's ultimate goal is to be the foundational protocol for the entire digital advertising ecosystem, built on Ethereum's blockchain to provide foundational support for various actors in the digital advertising industry to create their own applications.

So what does Lucidity really do for advertisers, one of the most important players in the digital advertising industry? In short, the Lucidity protocol solves the problem of ROI promotion. This is due to the direct effect of data transparency.

Thus, for advertisers, the issue of ROI promotion translates into a question of data transparency. At present, there are many black boxes in the process of digital advertising, including technology suppliers, agents, publishers, etc., they can maintain their own data. Each participating role tries to evaluate the performance of an ad in a way that maximizes its own interests, and attempts to maintain its own data ownership.

Of course, from a game perspective, there's nothing wrong with that. Blockchain offers a new option, and no one can own a blockchain, which is a distributed ledger.

Lucidity can achieve transparency through identification, data chaining, and more.

In the era of traditional television broadcasting and newspaper advertising, marketing professionals can only measure the value of advertising through market research and other means, can never be accurate, the wide spread of the net is helpless.

In the Internet age, it is possible to record and count impressions, clicks, downloads, registrations, volumes, retention rates, etc., but it is not possible to determine whether the real customer is behind all the traffic. There are a lot of people for 薅 wool, when you need to show and click, you can make the data look great by the way the machine clicks, when you need downloads and registrations, you use a variety of distributed incentive tasks to subcontract to countless individual users, all downloads and registrations are real, but they are not your real users.

These have caused a lot of trouble for advertisers. It's not easy to have better digital tools to measure the value of your ads, and the result is new false questions.

Lucidity's identification and data chaining can solve false problems.

Lucidity achieves identity through the identity registry and digital signature, while remaining anonymous. This is for advertisers, first of all, can determine the identity of the publisher, do not worry about the robot's false brush volume and false prosperity, can confirm that the information is published on the most appropriate website or application.

The benefit of the Lucidity protocol is that once the data is chained, all data and transactions cannot be tampered with, which is helpful for transparency and efficiency in the industry.

How does Lucidity address data differences?

First of all, data differences are common in the advertising industry chain. There are data differences between advertisers and agencies, between advertisers and publishers, and between technology partners.

Each of the different participants will play the game in a way that maximizes their own interests. In order to sort out the differences in data, marketing practitioners often use various links to find the differences in these data, because the interests of each other are different, but also take a long time to play the game, the result is a great waste of time and money, more fatal, this will inevitably affect the pace of business promotion.

Lucidity's first priority for transparency is to address data differences. To address data discrepies, Lucidity has a role as a validator, consisting of advertisers, publishers, and other third-party agencies. The validator will be rewarded for his or her verification behavior.

The authenticator holds Lucidity tokens, tracks and validates campaigns using open source software, views data streams from advertisers and publishers, and feedbacks the validator's independently recorded metrics to the platform.

To encourage accurate recording, returns are linked to the accuracy of the validated person. Lucidity completes aggregate data analysis and consensus for independently validated metrics through smart contracts. The validaters submit independently recorded indicator data to the block, and the voting process is automatically opened. All data records are stored in smart contracts. The algorithm of the smart contract compares the submitted data records and results in validation results that match the conclusions of most validators.

Under normal circumstances, all validators have consistent verification conclusions. Lucidity systems are validated and analyzed by algorithms to prevent malicious manipulation. Once the data record results are verified, the data is stored on the blockchain for a long time and cannot be tampered with as a final result.

This solves the problem of data differences. For example, about exposure. Exposure tracking and validation applications can be built based on the Lucidity protocol, allowing participants to agree on the amount of exposure data.

In the process of automatically running ads, there will also be a variety of technical problems. For example, ads don't show up correctly, and sometimes they can't even be loaded on a web page. Even if it loads successfully, consumers may not see it. What's more, fraudsters are fraudulent with traffic by posing as legitimate publishers.

If exposure is tracked and validated through the Lucidity protocol, agreement can be reached on all parties' data. Lucidity is a decentralized system in which all authenticators independently validate campaign data and allow all participants to submit data records. Data records include exposure time, load time, and so on. This data is validated and agreed upon by smart contract algorithms, and the results are finally published to the Ethereum main chain.

Lucidity can also help advertisers track and validate each payment. In traditional ad bidding mode, the entire process is done in milliseconds and is automated by the program, making it difficult for advertisers to track costs. With The Lucidity system, advertisers can track and validate each payment, determine the cost of each delivery, and view the situation of a single publisher.

Maximize real user value: prevent bad money from eliminating good money

What are the benefits of Lucidity for publishers? For publishers, especially high-quality traffic publishers, can get back their own revenue.

In the end, the fraud of advertisers is not conducive to the development of the industry, but also to the benefit of the high-quality publishers themselves. Some high-quality traffic publishers, once the reputation of the entire digital advertising damage, advertising inventory resources also depreciated.

What's more, the identity of a high-quality publisher is stolen, and the result is that profits are stolen by fraudsters with false traffic. As mentioned earlier, some fraudsters disguise their websites or apps as legitimate publishers, thereby stealing publishers' ad inventory resources.

For example, the bidding process is done automatically by the program. When a program treats a fraudster's website or app as a legitimate publisher's website, the advertiser's money flowss into the fake site. It also means a loss of profits for premium publishers. Advertisers are wasting money because they're running on bot sites.

With the Lucidity protocol, you can create fraud-proof apps. Anti-fraud apps can make their ad inventory resources more valuable.

Lucidity creates a de-centralized registry for publishers' websites and mobile apps to prevent identity theft and fraud. Lucidity uses digital signatures to verify the identity of publishers so that fraudsters cannot engage in identity theft. At the same time, publishers add the benefit that their traffic value is tracked and validated. The more high-quality publishers, the more reliable the credibility will be built, and ultimately bring more business.

Use enhanced methods to achieve the purpose of subversion

According to the current general idea of blockchain projects, there are too many agency intermediaries in the advertising industry, blockchain can directly establish contact between advertisers and publishers, and even allow advertisers and data owner to directly contact. For example, in a de-centralized blockchain information project, the user's browsing data, search data, comment data, personal data, etc. are in the user's own control, advertisers want to give users ads, must first get the user's consent and pay the corresponding number of token to carry out. Of course, this could be a scenario for digital advertising in the future blockchain era.

But for now, for a long time, advertisers have had the vast majority of their users' data and are making money from selling it. Is there any possibility of improvement under the existing framework? instead of waiting until all the conditions are ripe to change the industry?

Unlike other blockchain projects, Lucidity is not trying to change the role of current industry players directly, but rather to provide participants with a way to jointly validate data through blockchain technology, resulting in industry transparency, enhancing ROI for advertisers, and recapturing traffic revenue for premium publishers.

From an operational point of view, Lucidity is also relatively simple to use, advertisers use dashboards to manage advertising campaigns. Lucidity tracking URLs can be generated through the dashboard. Users simply copy and paste the Lucidity tracking URL into the ad code. When the operation is complete, you can track the validation data record.

Luciditylanding

Lucidity is essentially a trusted system for measuring advertising metrics. It uses sidechain technology based on the Ethereum main chain, which consists of distributed authenticers. Lucidity provides a democracies for the digital advertising industry through blockchain technology, ultimately providing a standard for measuring the data provided by separate participants.

At its core are several aspects: Plasma-based sidechain architecture, registry mechanisms, PoS consensus, and money management.

1. Side chain architecture

This is Lucidity's side-chain architecture:

Sidechain's validators run open source software that enables a set of coding standards for calculating various metrics based on event data. Each verifier status machine can track, store, and calculate ad metrics independently. Stores logs of all received and calculated ad metrics in the Validator Content Ledger. There is a special code within the validator to perform the measurement standards. For example, how to define display ads. The specification is coded into the validator as a digital measurement standard.

Participants in the Lucidity sidechain digitally sign the data and send it to the authenticator node. Events entering the sidechain must be signed with an ECDSA key pair. The Lucidity protocol uses the "secp112r2" elliptic curve algorithm. Each validator who accepts the event message verifies its signature based on the participant registry. The contents of the event data message are also checked against the signature of the event, which creates the path to each ad event source.

2. Registry mechanism

At present, digital advertising metrics are difficult to implement. The reason is that the certification process involves certification of suppliers, which can make it difficult to upgrade and implement metrics, and many companies give up certification directly.

Lucidity enables trusted authentication of participants, authenticators, and advertising campaigns through a registry mechanism. It has registry smart contracts, participant registries, authenticator registries, and ad campaign registries. A registry smart contract is primarily a set of smart contracts that contain each principal information in the registry. Log messages are sent each time a principal is added or updated through a smart contract. It allows the authenticator to cache information from the registry and refresh the cache only when the registry is updated.

The principal on the participant registry participates in the side chain. Participants include advertisers, DSPs, trading platforms, SSPs, DMP, third parties, etc. The participant has its own public key, which validates the data that the participant sends to the sidechain.

The validator registry mainly refers to the validator stored in the registry as a smart contract, and the authenticator is whitelisted. The authenticator can associate the IP address with the authenticator's address. The validator needs to lock a minimum of 1000MAT tokens.

The ad campaign registry is where advertisers can create campaign tracking ad data metrics. Each activity has a chain and a lower part of the chain.

3. PoS Consensus

Lucidity uses PoS's consensus algorithm, which is the equivalent of a vote. Lucidity's side-chain commissioners launch a new consensus election in the 30th minute of each hour. The role of the Commissioner is simply to initiate elections and to count votes, which have no impact on the outcome of the elections.

During an election, the validator operator blindly selects the root hash value of a set of events collected during the election period. Each validated person's voting rights are weighted by the number of tokens they are mortgaged against.

Once two-thirds of the validator nodes reach a consensus, a new sidechain chunk is created that contains a list of validators, as well as a consensus root hash of the calculated metrics. The authenticator is responsible for updating the balance of the Ethereum main chain. The validers continue to calculate and vote on advertising metrics to achieve agreement on asset balances and advertising metrics.

Advertisers are the first to put money into related advertising campaigns, and the money is locked in smart contracts. Proof of the existence of the funds (Merkle certificate, activity ID, available balance, advertiser address) is required to remove the replacement currency from the advertising campaign.

Before an ad event is submitted to a validator, it is signed by the relevant participants (advertisers, DSPs, SSPs, publishers, trading platforms, third parties, etc.) and sorted by the time of signing. Events occur every 10 minutes as a consensus round. Each ad campaign requires a balance, and if the balance is zero, the unprocessed activity waits 24 hours. Once the metric calculation is complete, the corresponding charges are deducted from the advertising campaign funds.

The authenticator monitors time and changes in the smart contract and can convert the changes to a chain state. Changes are organized into the Merkle tree (advertiser balance, verifier balance, ad metrics). Only Mekle root is on the main chain. This facilitates the scalability of the system.

The validator uses tokens to vote for the next state of the system. To prevent multiple votes, smart contracts prevent token transfers when voting. One token, one vote. The validator participates in the poll every 60 minutes. The authenticator submits an encrypted metagroup (Merkle root ad metric, advertiser balance Merklegen, verifier balance Merklegen).

The validator randomly generates a 256-bit number (salt) and hash (SHA3) as well as actual data. The voting period lasts 5 minutes. For the next 5 minutes, the validator submits the input to display the actual data. The group that gets the most votes wins. The winning metagroup is used for various proofs and as a checkpoint for the system.

Each module produced by the consensus system consists of chain and off chain components. The part of the chain is the block head and the outer part of the chain is the transaction.

4. Fund management

Funds are managed through a series of smart contracts on the chain. Lucidity's mechanism is to deposit funds for specific advertising campaigns and also to withdraw revenue as a validator.

The lower part of the chain of advertising campaigns is managed by the authenticated person. Each ad campaign has a unique ID generated by a smart contract, and transactions to update the ad campaign must be included in the location of the Mekle tree corresponding to the activity ID.

The authenticator balance is also treed by Merkle, and their roots are stored into each block header. Each authenticator also has a unique ID, and transactions that update the validator balance must also be included in the Location tree corresponding to the validator ID. The authenticator has two balances, one for mortgage currency and one for token revenue.

Participants in the side chain can also receive payments. Each participant has a unique ID generated by the smart contract. Finally, withdrawals require advertisers or account holders to have proof of ownership of the account and Mekle proof. Withdrawal requests will include withdrawal amounts, current account balances, and Mekle proof. Once the proof and balance are verified, the token is released.

LucidityToken Value and Digital Advertising Ecosystem

Lucidity tokens are functional tokens that require the purchase of Lucidity Tokens (MAT, Marketing Analytics Tokens) to become a validator of the system. There are tokens to access the platform. Only validators with Lucidity tokens can use open source software to track and validate marketing campaigns and view the data flow of advertisers and publishers.

MAT token is the meaning of marketing analysis token, it is equity, consensus and governance token, representing the work contribution of the validator. The value of MAT comes from the number and depth of participants in the entire digital advertising ecosystem, and the more participants who use the Lucidity protocol, the more validators need to hold MAT, which means that there is a growing demand for MAT, fewer ANDTs in circulation, and more MAT value.

Given that there are many advertisers, advertisers, DSPs, technology providers, and so on, there are many validators, if the Lucidity protocol can be accepted by the participants in the digital advertising industry, MAT token value has its own roots.

For the validator, because of the use of PoS, mortgaged MAT tokens, the more MAT mortgage, the higher the accuracy of the data submitted, the greater the return, on the other way, if you try to maliciously destroy the network, they will suffer losses.

Why do I need MAT tokens instead of mortgaged directly with eth? For validators, mat tokens are directly related to them as part of the entire Lucidity network, and the rise and fall of eth are not directly linked to their contributions.

Conclusion.

At present, a lot of digital advertising costs are wasted, but do not know how to waste, the current whole ecological participants have their own differences in data, it is difficult to reach a consensus, not only waste money, but also waste energy and time, slow down the pace of business.

Faced with this situation, some blockchain projects try to remove all intermediaries directly, allowing users with data to contact advertisers directly. Undeniably, this is the vision that blockchain has given us, but it will take a long time for this day to finally come.

Using blockchain and smart contract technology, Lucidity proposes a new solution that allows validators to submit data records through Lucidity protocols without compromising existing business processes and participants, and to finally reach a consensus on data through smart contracts and PoS consensus mechanisms to address data differences and achieve transparency, which means efficient and better value for money for marketers.

In addition, Lucidity's registry mechanism allows fraudulent websites and fraudulent applications to go nowhere, allowing high-quality publishers to make profits that should have belonged to them.

Lucidity also leverages PoS's mechanisms to motivate validators to contribute to the entire advertising ecosystem and submit more accurate data records. Finally, all the data chained, open, non-tamperable, censorable, advertisers can also better measure the effectiveness of each delivery, more efficient optimization of advertising delivery, to achieve the goal of improving ROI, with less cost to obtain a better price/performance ratio.

If the Lucidity protocol can be adopted by the digital advertising industry, it can subsequently burst out of energy is relatively rapid, because of its excellent landing performance, compared to other blockchain projects, it is easier to show results in the short and medium term. Such an exploration is worth looking forward to.

Risk warning: Blue Fox all articles do not constitute investment recommendations, investment risk, it is recommended to carry out in-depth investigation of the project, carefully do their own investment decisions.

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