Digital advertising blockchain startup XCHNG layer network consensus engine now handles 180,000 transactions per second

The digital advertising blockchain, XCHNG (pronounced “exchange”), is an open source blockchain framework for recording online ad insertion orders (IO) built by Kochava. It also provides a blockchain framework for framework for the digital advertising ecosystem. XCHNG establishes a common set of rails available to the entire advertising community. The Idaho-based Kochava is the global leader in digital advertising measurement and attribution.

XCHNG dramatically reduces the need for third party intermediation in digital advertising. Whether advertisers, publishers, or other industry players, all parties stand to benefit from a more transparent, efficient marketplace. Advertisers in particular, frustrated with today’s cumbersome and wasteful system, are demanding that the industry move in this direction. XCHNG secures and standardizes the process of buying and selling digital advertising through decentralization, removing reliance upon a central monopoly.

The company just completed its Fifth Annual Kochava Mobile Summit, which took place February 14. During the Summit, the company also shared a live demo of the Consensus Engine Benchmark within XCHNG. The team showed transaction speeds of the peer-to-peer layer network consensus engine, which is how transactions are processed. XCHNG demonstrated the ability to handle 180,000 transactions per second to a single smart contract composed of multiple insertion orders. Attendees also discovered how new technologies like XCHNG will help fight fraud, improve transparency, facilitate secure and efficient transactions, and most importantly, how blockchain applies to their business.

XCHNG is revolutionizing digital advertising.

The current system of digital advertising for connected devices is dysfunctional, complicated and inefficient. According to the company, 50% of ad spend is wasted on middleware and mediation, stolen by fraudsters, or otherwise lost. It’s unsecured and lacks standardization and transparency. XCHNG is the open and unified blockchain solution that will provide stability, security, efficiency and transparency in the digital advertising industry. Today, marketers are stuck with a complex, centralized technology path to customers. The decentralized model of XCHNG simplifies through peer-to-peer buying and selling. Leveraging a Blockchain standard for digital advertising removes the intermediaries and allows buyers and sellers to transact directly. The blockchain will serve as an immutable record of advertising IOs, providing a protocol and APIs for the other, non-blockchain-integrated ad services. It currently does not support real-time bidding. However, as demonstrated it handles far more transactions per second compared to the current traditional approach.

The IOs will be handled as blockchain-based smart contracts, and the ecosystem will operate as a kind of private marketplace. The IO specifics, delivery and performance specs are available immediately to all parties throughout the blockchain’s shared and distributed ledger. As a smart contract, the IO will fulfill the terms of its own agreement by generating tokens when the ad is delivered and played, and those tokens will trigger payment by the integrated payment provider. Here’s a simple diagram from the XCHNG site:

Manning said Kochava won’t make any money on the buying and selling of ads, with its financial benefit coming as one of the providers of measurement services. His company, he said, is the “steward” but not the authority of this open source ecosystem, which others will also help maintain.

“Beyond the hype, marketers are interested in the operational value of blockchain being applied to digital advertising. Few companies have the capacity to deliver on that, but marketers are seeing that we’re working toward that end with XCHNG,” Manning said. At the close of the Fifth Annual Kochava Mobile Summit, the company announced Mark Connon, former Senior Vice President and Global Chief Mobile & Data Officer at AOL Platforms & Advertising, as the newest XCHNG advisor.

Kochava CEO, Charles Manning, said, “This year’s Kochava Mobile Summit has brought together over 200 mobile industry experts who were enthusiastic and curious about the far-reaching transformative capabilities of blockchain on digital advertising. During the Summit, conversations centered around digital advertising’s fast-moving landscape and possible solutions—all of which can be facilitated on XCHNG and the XCHNG smart contract insertion order. By assembling some of the leading companies and experts in digital advertising, blockchain, markets and beyond, to be part of XCHNG, we are quickly realizing our vision of a unified framework for the industry that is centered around the next generation insertion order.”