adChain Registry Dev Kickoff

Good news! MetaX and ConsenSys have structured the build out phase of the adChain ecosystem, and we’re now ready to kick off development in earnest. We’ve put together a rockstar team and a development timeline that adToken holders will love.

I’m Mike. You might recognize my name from the adChain whitepaper. I’m a software developer and I am managing the adChain project from the ConsenSys side. Here’s a video of me talking with Jake from CoinFund where I describe my own vision for adChain, and why I find it to be such a compelling project.

Instantiating the adChain Ecosystem

There are three things we need to build to instantiate the adChain ecosystem. They are:

1. The adChain Registry itself, including its voting and governance systems.
2. Client-side applications for human users to interface with the on-chain systems.
3. Reference implementations of bidder and ad server integrations.

The adChain Registry

This is the cryptosystem described in our whitepaper, and the backbone of a cryptoeconomic game that produces a high-quality publisher whitelist. The Registry is seemingly simple in principle, but we’ll need to build the first ever open-source implementation of a partial-lock commit/reveal voting system as well as an efficient and game-theoretically sound parametrization system.

As always with cryptosystems, rigorous testing discipline and thorough auditing will be required before we feel confident we are deploying a system resilient to exploits and which will not lock, burn, lose or otherwise mishandle user’s tokens.

Client-side applications

The adChain Registry will be deployed on public Ethereum, meaning it will be accessible with tools such as MyEtherWallet, Mist, Parity or even a command line. Anyone will be able to wrap the adChain Registry contracts in their preferred UIs, and we hope that people do so! We are going to lead the way by publishing high-quality client-side applications which can run on desktops and browsers to interface with the adChain Registry. We will provide GUI interfaces tailored for applicants, challengers, voters and token holders who desire to take part in the Registry’s parametrization processes.

Reference bidders and ad servers

We describe a means of authenticating RTB bid requests as originating from adChain-listed sites in our whitepaper which uses widely-deployed mutual TLS technology. This method is totally non-proprietary and anybody could implement it on their own in their existing bidders and ad servers. We want to provide reference implementations for popular tools in the ecosystem to make this as easy as possible for advertisers and publishers alike.

The Team

MetaX and ConsenSys have teamed up to bring the adChain Registry to life. The development team presently consists of:

Mike Goldin (Me, ConsenSys)

Miguel Mota (MetaX)

Eduardo Muñoz (MetaX)

Edwin Cheung (MetaX)

Manuel Amaya (MetaX)

Miguel Morales (MetaX)

A team of six superstar ConsenSys interns have been working on the project quietly since June:

Terry Li (Columbia University)

Irene Lin (Carnegie Mellon University)

Cem Ozer (Northwestern University)

Aspyn Palatnick (The University of Pennsylvania)

Yorke Rhodes (Rice University)

Mira Zeitlin (Carnegie Mellon University)

The Roadmap

We are currently ahead of the timeline proposed in our whitepaper to deliver the adChain Registry. We intend to:

August 2017: Have a nearly feature-complete adChain Registry deployed to testnets.

September 2017: Share functional betas of client-side user interfaces.

October 2017: Freeze the cryptosystem’s API.

November 2017: Complete a rigorous test suite for the cryptosystem, begin audit process.

December 2017: Share Beta 2 client applications with feature-complete smart contracts and reference bidder integration.

Q1 2018: Share reference ad server integration.

Q2 2018: Publish the results of a complete audit by a reputable diligencing group, deploy a complete product to mainnet-Ethereum.

This puts us completing ahead of what we estimated in our whitepaper. This is largely due to the fast progress of the team so far in implementing the core elements of the cryptosystem as well as rigorous test suites.

The Plan

To deliver on the roadmap, MetaX and ConsenSys will be working on all of the ecosystem components in parallel.

ConsenSys will deliver the cryptosystem described in the adChain whitepaper: the adChain Registry as well as its voting and governance systems, tested, audited and deployed to the Ethereum mainnet. All of this work will be open-sourced under permissive licenses.

MetaX engineers will lead the development of graphical, client-side interfaces to the cryptosystem for use by human users in applying, challenging, voting and governing, as well as the development of reference adChain-aware bidders and ad servers.

What’s Next

We will begin regularly publishing dev diaries, code walkthroughs, and milestone updates on development progress. We also hope to share case studies of integrations with and applications built on adChain. MetaX and ConsenSys have begun regular engineering standup meetings to coordinate development, and our communications teams are in-sync on regular content sharing.

A Bonus

The adChain whitepaper states that challenges to listings in the Registry will be resolved using partial-lock commit/reveal voting, as described by the Colony project. I’m super excited to share with you all an early artifact of our work on the larger adChain project: a completely generic implementation of partial-lock commit/reveal voting in Solidity. We are using this implementation in the adChain Registry, but the PLCRVoting repo itself is completely unaware of and unopinionated about its usage. We sincerely hope that this cryptographic primitive can be used throughout the ecosystem for many applications of token-weighted voting! I’ll be writing a code walkthrough of the PLCR contract in the near future.