Adrealm’s Q&A from its first Ask Me Anything

Adrealm held its first Ask Me Anything round on November 21, 2018 (yesterday) on Reddit.
We would like to express our gratitude to all the questioners for their active participation in our AMA and for their keen interest in our project.

For those who could not make it, here is the transcript of the questions submitted on Reddit, YouTube, and through other social media channels.
The answers were provided by the Executive Director of the Adrealm Think Tank (AEIOU), J Ellis Cameron-Perry, with the contribution of some members from the marketing team as well as from the developers' team.

FROM OUR AMA

Q: Is the ARM token listed in any exchange yet? What Is the maximum supply? And it’s price?
By Bassem Mahmoudi, João Breyer, Sophia Wang and Minhduy Võ

A: NO — ARM is not yet listed on any exchange. We’ve been approaching the ICO with caution and care, and therefore Adrealm’s ARM token is not listed on any exchange at the moment.
We are gearing up for our ICO at the beginning of next year — it’s a process we take very seriously.

The plan is to put 900,000,000 ARM tokens for sale.

The price hasn’t been set yet.

Q: Are there any updates you can share regarding Adrealm’s next big milestones?
By Ruben Fernandez4780

A: We’re on track with plans to launch the Adrealm ecosystem in 2019 Q2.

At the moment we’re testing the smart contracts and transaction-capability, and optimizing key features — eg, the AI anti-fraud function.

At the beginning of next year, we’ll integrate Adrealm’s self-operating service providers into the chain, for comprehensive testing.

Once we’ve made sure the ecosystem is working well, we’ll proceed with the launch of Adrealm 1.0, in the second quarter of 2019.

Q: What are the benefits you aim to achieve with your project compared to traditional online advertising?
From Matevz Jaz and Макс Бакс

A: Ok — great question.
A key point of difference is that advertiser data does not need to be shared throughout all processes (smart contract execution, data proof, anti-fraud functionalities). These are performed on the advertiser’s own nodes.

We’re also proud of our unique consensus mechanism, Proof of Valid Traffic. PoVT prioritizes honesty, and rewards integrity. We’ve built into the system a quality standard for the execution of business contracts. Advertisers can trust independent publishers and developers, while developers can make sure they will receive good-quality ads and improve their user retention rate.

We intend to build a space that welcomes independent service providers — including those who focus on anti-fraud technology.

Q: I have a question: How will Adrealm distinguish itself from competitors? (If Any)
By ad864

A: Let’s take data privacy as an example — and this is a huge problem in the industry. Something that distinguishes us from competitors is how our ecosystem distributes the contract execution process onto three different layers, minimize both the sharing of data, as well as the actors involved in the process.

Q: What is the meaning of Adrealm?
By TheCryptoTips

A: Adrealm = advertising realm, which is a regal (too regal?) way of saying “digital advertising ecosystem.”
Our focus is mobile ad monetization, and we aim to create a sustainable and self-sustaining ecosystem for the industry’s stakeholders. Subsequently, it dawned on me that we can parse-out the name this way: “ad” means “towards” in Latin, and so (loosely!) ad realm also means “towards reality.”

Cool, right? Although we didn’t know it at the time, ad realm identifies exquisitely the fact we strive to achieve results that meet the real needs of the three main actors in the advertising industry: developers, advertisers, and service providers. We’re busy every day moving towards solutions that can overcome the major issues in the sector — ad fraud and lack of transparency chief among them. So here, too, ad realm is apt: moving toward reality and away from bad faith and fraud.

Q: Hello, how does the so-called Proof of Valid Traffic work? How will it be able to report and avoid low-quality content?
By Blockchain_Seeker

A: Hi — so, Proof of Valid Traffic (PoVT)… this is the self-adapting consensus mechanism designed by the Adrealm team.
Here’s how it works. In the traditional advertising industry, Valid Traffic (VT) is a value metric used to determine the effectivity of a monetization campaign. Think of VT as established by answering questions like:

Have ads damaged the UX of the app or game?
What’s the click-through rate?
What is the conversion ratio (CVR)?
How’s the ROI?

So, at the start of a campaign, the advertiser sets the metrics (target audience, how much they are willing to spend for clicks or installs, etc), and establishes a third-party data tracking service provider, etc. When the campaign is over, analysis of the traffic determines whether and how well the standards have been met. Advertisers will not conclude that goals have been reached if the ads have been clicked by bots, or the campaign has been compromised SIVT, right? They’re going to pay for valid traffic only — and when they pay, and the inference is that the traffic they got was as valid and as bot-free (etc) as was technically possible.

The core idea of PoVT is that consensus has to serve the business model. The arms race between fraudsters and fraud-catchers plays-out daily, and it doesn’t seem likely that all fraud can be 100% eliminated all of the time. But our ecosystem rewards only those parties who are delivering to the best of their ability what they are selling.

A Valid Traffic score is used as a value, and is stored in the accounts of each of the actors. This results in the assignment of a level of importance and weight attached to the account of each participant, and is intended to incentivize honesty and transparency. The score serves for node votes, reputation ranking, community votes, and reward calculations (etc).

In other words: Bad Valid Traffic score means Bad Business.

Adrealm has its own data tracking service provider, Xhance; but the ecosystem is open to other DApps.

Q: How do you plan to fight advertising fraud?
By Roberto Ippoliti

A: Cheers — let me say, first, that it is an ongoing battle. Fraud is rampant, and it isn’t going to fall to any single silver bullet (because: there are no silver bullets). Mimetic polymorphism, and parasites (to say nothing of retroviruses) are ample proof that the arms race between (on the one hand) predator and prey, between entities that will exploit organisms (and by analogy: systems) for their benefit, and (on the other) schemes to avoid being something’s meal.

In our ecosystem, we engage fraud and the potential of fraud in three ways:

The inherent anti-fraud capability of the ad platform itself
Use of third-party tracking and attribution anti-fraud functionalities
The retention and deployment of independent anti-fraud service providers

The Adrealm ecosystem is built on three layers: a blockchain, an off-chain layer, and a service layer. In the service layer, service providers can offer anti-fraud features, such as those which evaluate the likelihood of fraudulent activities for a specific transaction. Whenever fraudulent activities are detected, parties can refuse to proceed and analyze the data to evaluate the evidence of fraud.

So far, this sort of thing is not happening to the extent that it could. This is because advertisers are reluctant to hand over their data to third-parties. At the same time, developers are not incentivized to report fraud — ie, the prospect that such information it could exacerbate lack of trust.

Adrealm aims to minimize the sharing of data so to enable advertisers to trust service providers without jeopardizing privacy. Our ecosystem will use a real-time AI-powered anti-fraud operating environment. This will download anti-fraud services, import real-time impressions, and record all operating processes.

We’re super proud of this and are looking forward to use-case testing within the next 10 weeks.

Q: Do you feel like the crypto economy, or memetic advertising and influencing will ever become too big to fail? Are they already?
By Annathematic

A: Great great question — — and you’re asking about something always on my mind.
We’re all watching very closely the SEC, the daily teeter-totter of the market, and signs from analysts, banks, informed rubberneckers, and anyone with skin in the game.

Too big to fail? My worry is too failed to get big.

The cull is underway, and those who punted fast grabbed headlines and filled their pockets. But we cannot, in my opinion, worry about the token economy until we have enough tokens worthy of an economy.

Q: Honestly I’m more concerned with the effects of memetic learning on the collective human psyche. Especially given the clime of the present political culture. Do we even know what any of these things are doing to us? Or what their implications are? Given the track record of the human race getting in over our heads, it seems like some of the applications are quite alarming. How off base am I to have these concerns?
By Annathematic

A: A deep, thoughtful question — and I for one do not believe you are off-base. I hope only that I am up to the challenge of offering a non-gratuitous reply.

Mimetic Extreme Learning Machines (so-called), and perhaps AI generally, invite (demand?) a number of questions — — especially when these things are connected to face-recognition software, SurTec (surveillance technology), and the like.
Neither myself nor anyone here at The Adrealm Foundation are Luddites, Luddite-ish, or even Luddite-esque. The most extreme scepticism here is perhaps found with me, and at its worst, it’s a kind of “Amism.” And so I do ask (every day) “Quo vadis?” — where are we going?

I spend part of every day reading “millennial” literature — by which I mean, stuff published between 1890 and 1910. These days I’m reading some of the wonderful nonfiction written by H G Wells (1901, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought). This passage struck a note with me, and I quote it at length:

The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a very interesting phase in that great development of means of land transit that has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam engine running upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, the first great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode of transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this century’s history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of the addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind.

A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the history of the world?

Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the development strikes one — as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin strikes one — as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the need for the railway and steam engine had only just arisen, and — to use one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever dropped from the lips of man — the demand created the supply; it was quite the other way about. There was really no urgent demand for such things at the time…

An even better example comes from LP Jacks, who (in 1916) expressed concerns about the uses to which technology was being put in “the great war.” I discuss Jacks here and provide a link to the article in question.

So: Wither are we marching? And do we need all these high-tech fixes? Will these cures prove worse than the diseases they’re meant to solve? Indeed, even these questions require us to assume that the end-game is the solving of problems, rather than the monetising of opportunities to punt solutions.

The conceptual elision between a “pain point” and a “problem” disturbs me; the fascination and with “disruption” annoys me, and the fact that some of our planet’s smartest and most switched-on people seem truly to believe that technology is the answer to our most pressing questions troubles me.

Mimetic learning itself doesn’t keep me awake at night, but the fact too few people are thinking critically about things like mimetic learning does. But this is one reason why the AEIOU exists — and your questions are comforting, precisely because they point to uncomfortable things.

A: Thank you for answering. I feel there would be ways that technology could solve many problems for us. The question is, will we destroy ourselves before we progress enough to figure it out. The path we are on isn’t quite there yet. That’s my take on it, given my limited scope of perception. Honestly, those scenarios don’t worry me nearly as much as others do.
By Annathematic

Q: How long have you been developing this project, and which results have you obtained so far?
By ad864

A: Planning began in January 2018, and operations commenced in February 2018. We are currently testing both our chain, as well as Xhance, our data attribution platform. Xhance — the world’s first data attribution DApp — was launched last August. We are going to open Beta testing in December 2018.

Results:

Initial feedback regarding Xhance is positive — we have a version that can run out with our public chain, and a dozen units are giving it a whirl. At a price 30% less than our most similar competitor, things are looking very good indeed.
Professor Anindya Ghose from NYU joined The Adrealm Foundation this Autumn as a strategic advisor. (He gave a great presentation at our first public lecture series — see here for details.) Professor Ghose will help us review and analyze the results from our test-net trials.

We survived the decline and fall of the ICO craze — and that is thanks to our CEO, Brian Xie, who is a damned good leader and shrewd observer of industry trends. We’re working hard every day, but we’re also moving slowly and carefully. Building a potentially industry-changing industry takes time, and we’re not taking shortcuts. This, I think, is a result worth noting.

Q: What is the main purpose of the Adrealm’s AMA?
By Andrews Game and Crypto Mir

A: Fine question. I hope my answer is adequate. It will certainly be direct.
PR, and community-building — that is why we’re doing this AMA. We’re hoping also to establish that we are indeed real, honest, hard-working folk.

I liked your question so much that I sent it to my colleagues. Laura, who is in charge of social media (and who you may know from our videos), offered this answer:

Have you ever downloaded an app and uninstalled it right away because it was full of ads? Or have you ever clicked on an ad (inadvertently or not) and your phone was suddenly stuck? Our goal is to prevent all this from happening by using blockchain technology.

The main pain-points of the advertising industry are ad fraud, lack of transparency, invalid traffic, and low-quality ads. You’d be surprised to know that ad fraud cost around $6.5 billion in 2017, as 90% of ad clicks are fraudulent (according to TalkinData). And we’ve realized that the current advertising industry actually does not incentivize its stakeholders not to keep on going with such trend; moreover, many advertising platforms are simply not equipped enough to fight ad fraud.

It’s a loss in terms of money, users, trust, and quality which is harming everyone. But if we use transparency as an evaluation metric and trust as the “password” to access our ecosystem without adding any new role, such issues can be overcome.

You may ask: Why not have a “centralized judge” to monitor and punish bad behaviours?

I can answer with a question: Who watches the watchers?

So, we want to spread the word, we want you to know why we’re working hard on our project because we are confident that its contribution will go beyond the borders of the advertising industry.

Q: How can your project help others, like other poor countries?
By Andrews Game

A: This is an interesting question and it goes beyond the usual, technical queries typical for an AMA of this sort. Thank you for asking.

In one sentence: Adrealm wants to make mobile monetization accessible for everyone, without compromising the quality of ads and the quality of traffic. Ideally, our ecosystem will improve the quality of advertising and drive dodgy traffic to the fringes of extinction.

In poorer countries (to use your phrase), where capital and resources are limited, our ecosystem allows everyone involved in the campaign to save money by not wasting it in the first place.

I may mention also that, beginning in June, we started looking at how Adrealm and some of our proprietary tools, could be used by NGOs and aid/development agencies, in their efforts to promote their goals and good-works. This is on the front-burner, and we hope to begin strategic engagement with these sorts of stakeholders in 2019.
Laura, the uber-literate genius who manages our social media and produces our videos, has this to say on the subject:

Right now, it’s like this: imagine the industry as a fishbowl where advertisers, publishers, and developers are swimming. Some of them have bigger, stronger flippers that help them reach the water surface to catch the food; the weak ones can only get some falling crumbles. Furthermore, the water hasn’t been changed since a while, therefore the weakest fishes are dying due to malnutrition and bad environment.

Well, Adrealm wants to change the water, add a water purifier, as well as more channels to inject food into the water bowl.
To explain how we’d like to do it, I have to introduce a couple of premises first:

Mobile Internet penetration is increasing (98% of all netizens in China)
Southeast Asia is the world leader in mobile internet usage
Purchasing smartphones are getting cheaper.

The Internet is a vehicle of education and possibilities that overcomes one’s country borders.

How does this relate to Adrealm?

Adrealm focuses on creating a high-quality source of income through mobile monetization. Mobile game revenues in SEA reached 1.4 billion this year, and the numbers are expected to increase, both in terms of (mobile) internet penetration as well as of mobile game revenues. Nonetheless, advertisers and developers face several problems which make the advertising industry risky for everyone and accessible only by wealthy actors at higher levels.

Why?

Developers have to deal with two kinds of issues when ready to embark in the mobile monetization journey: UX damaging factors, such as ad frauds and low-quality traffic on one side; complicated, not-transparent processes to integrate ads into one’s game. Whom should they trust? How do they know it won’t harm the game experience? How can they hand in the private data stored on the app/game to unknown parties or advertisers? Low-quality ads can destroy a mobile app, and in the long run, it will mean absolutely no revenue for the developer.

On the other side, advertisers are struggling too: there is an abundance of independent publishers and developers which demands careful evaluation to assess which channels can drive good traffic for them. This assessment process is time and money consuming, and it often cannot be afforded by small to medium-sized advertisers.

Well, Adrealm aims to prevent all these problems from happening by creating a trustworthy environment and at the same time empower its stakeholders. Blockchain technology is not an easy one, but we’re confident that its understanding and application will improve quite fast, therefore creating an affordable tool to produce “sustainable” revenues for everyone.

This is a simplified answer to a very complex question, please feel free to ask further in case you want to know more.

Q: There are a few words about data security in the white paper: “data will be separated from an advertiser perspective and encrypted”, so who will get the access to this data in the end?
By Blockchain_Seeker

A: Hi — smart and insightful question. Thanks! I will try for our reply not to sound like a sales-pitch; but in answering, it is difficult to avoid mentioning some of our products and features.

Xhance, Adrealm’s data attribution platform, supports two deployment modalities — Cloud & Private. In private mode, the specific advertiser is the only one who receives the ownership of data and is capable of assigning privileges.

The criteria or evidence of auditors is to be found on the digest chain, where data from advertisers are recorded, stored, and finally hashed out with non-sensitive info.

The digest chain can be opened to all actors, but it can only be used to proof data.

Adrealm is going to open the explorer of the digest chain very soon, probably in Q1 2019.

In an effort to offer a concise answer, Laura and Alex helped me consult with our heads of engineering. Thanks, everyone!

Q: Thank you, Dr Ellis.
Another question: What do you think about high transaction costs associated with PoW consensus mechanism and how have you calculated data for transaction costs at Adrealm?
By Blockchain_Seeker

A: Good evening from Shanghai.

PoW works great for the chain that creates Bitcoins and sustains transactions thereupon. That particular kind of PoW is brilliant if one understands it as a conversion of electricity/electro-computational power into “digital specie” (BTC). High transaction costs therein may or may not be part and parcel of the Bitcoin-chain economy, but that (main) public chain is its own beast.

Non-PoW chains are different animals altogether, and PoW isn’t an ideal consensus protocol for what we’re building and seeking to achieve.

Consider: Ethereum is a kind of PoS, designed to avoid the downsides of PoW (and the Bitcoin chain). They (Ethereum) sought to create a chain that is hospitable to things like smart-contracts. (Bravo.) Indeed, blockchain projects are increasingly leaning on PoS/PoI (etc.) consensus protocols, and steering clear of PoW mechanisms.

Adrealm’s PoVT is based on PoS/PoI, which ensures more efficiency and sustainability. The “greener” we can make our ecosystem, the better. Happily, PoVT results in higher TPSs (transactions per second).

In sum: we’ve built Adrealm for business-use, not for mining. Transactions will be quick, and transaction costs will be low.

Q: Dr Ellis, good morning, I would like to know what AEIOU stands for, I know it’s your think tank, and it sounds interesting, but what does it stand for?
By AmarantaBJ

A: Thank you — I love this question.

AEIOU stands for Adrealm Editorial and Intelligence Operations Unit. That’s the name we came up with for The Adrealm Foundation’s in-house think-tank.

These, of course, are the vowels in the English alphabet, so, our initials are easy to remember. But you probably know that ‘y’ sometimes works as a vowel (“a e i o u, and sometimes y”). We couldn’t resist using this as a tagline; hence:

AEIOU: Always “Why?”

Here are some articles published by AEIOU:

“Blockchain and Pricing in the Mortgage Insurance Industry — The Great War to Détente”

“Democratic Radicalism vs Liberal Radicalism”

“Why A Decentralized System is Good for Digital Advertising”

Click here to see all the AEIOU articles.

We do, by the way, welcome contributions!