The past year has been amazing for AdEx and our community: we launched the Platform publicly, onboarded large advertisers and publishers, upgraded the ADX token to allow for incentivized staking - paving the way to a sustainable network security model, and expanded into the DeFi space!
Today we're excited to share our vision for 2021!
The underlying technology that powers AdEx, the AdEx Protocol, is getting an upgrade to version 5, or simply V for the roman numeral. The Protocol has went through many iterations in the past, starting from an escrow for direct ad deals, to a payment channel system empowering programmatic per-impression payments.
AdEx V is a technical overhaul of the underlying OUTPACE payment channel system that's currently under development, enabling the following new features:
- Transaction cost reductions through gas cost optimizations and improvements to how campaign validator fees are calculated: making AdEx a lot more permissive to use even if the Ethereum network is congested
- Higher number of transactions per second: a single set of validators would be able to process over 20k TPS
- New staking pools with automatic ADX buybacks, automatic compounding and built-in insurance
This also paves the way to a long-requested feature: enabling the community to run public validators!
Right now, the AdEx Validator software is open-source and advertisers can run it to further secure their campaigns. But since most advertisers do not need that high level of assurance, they let AdEx automatically delegate other validators.
In 2021, we'll ship infrastructure and tools and enable any third party with sufficient know-how to run their own validator and plug it into the AdEx registry, therefore helping process micropayments on advertiser campaigns and earning fees. Each validator will have to have it's own staking pool, along with a large stake from the operator themselves.
This feature is estimated to arrive later in the year.
Validator fees (~7% of all AdEx advertising volume) will be used to buyback ADX and distribute it proportionally to stakers.
Staking pools will also have automatic compounding for your rewards, which means you will no longer need to re-stake all the time: this will save stakers a lot in gas fees!
The current main staking pool, the Tom pool, will be migrated over to the new staking pool architecture and will retain a similar APY, and will benefit from the new features!
We'll be making significant improvements to the withdraw fees of the AdEx Platform, as a result fees will be up to 3x lower.
To implement this, we are implementing an improvement to how the validators crunch data that allows multiple ad campaigns to reuse the same payment channel. Furthermore, channels will stay open indefinitely unless challenged. This means that a single publisher withdraw would cost a fraction of what it did, even if the publisher earned funds from multiple campaigns.
There will be gas fee optimizations too for the staking portal, with the introduction of the new staking pools.
If a payment channel becomes offline, all affected advertisers will be fully refunded for their stuck campaigns using the validator's ADX stake - therefore, staking will also act as built-in insurance.
Besides the automated ADX buybacks (around 7% of all volume on AdEx will be used to buy ADX and distribute it to stakers), we've got other token economics improvements planned as well.
The new staking pools will also allow staking of the new BPT LP token (60-40 yUSD-ADX), therefore combining validator staking with sustainable yield farming.
Finally, using ADX in the Platform is making a comeback! The exact details will be announced later once AdEx V is released!
Perhaps the most powerful adtech feature that we'll develop in 2021 is making AdEx interoperable with the vast world of adtech.
We will be integrating AdEx with Prebid.js by implementing a bidder adapter. This means that any publisher that is currently using header bidding through Prebid.js will be able to seamlessly integrate AdEx.
While we still believe that display advertising has room to grow and has potential for disruption, the future largely lies in alternative, less intrusive ad formats, namely native ads. A recent example of this is Coinmarketcap removing all banner ads.
We'll be adding support for HTML5 creatives too, adding more flexibility to display advertising.
This is not so much of a roadmap goal, but rather a statement that AdEx is already compatible with all of the privacy updates in the Apple ecosystem, Chrome, Firefox and others, as AdEx does not use third-party cookies.
In 2021, we will work to improve our contextual targeting (read more), which always was and will stay independent of cookies, making it unaffected by recent privacy updates and compatible with regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA.
- Q1: finalizing AdEx V software development: smart contracts, tests, validator changes, full audits
- Q2: migrating staking pools and updating the Platform to run over AdEx V - in this quarter, we will ship the new staking pools with ADX buyback and auto-compounding and the new Platform with significantly lower fees
- Q3: in Q3, we will focus on the adtech features while running trials/testnets of payment channels managed by public validators. We will also enable campaign insurance
- Q4: first public validators
Note: this timeline is subject to change. While our roadmap is very ambitious, we are confident we will deliver on all of the important milestones. As we further narrow down our priorities throughout the year, we may shuffle around some of the minor features on the roadmap.
The future is bright and we're excited to be entering the fifth year of our development and growth, as well as, coincidently, the fifth iteration of our protocol!
With the know-how and userbase we've aquired in the last 4 years, we're confident that 2021 is going to be the best year for us.
Stay tuned for more updates!