Polkadot: Fulfilling Web3’s Promise

Ecosystem
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1

Hello Everyone!

We are a team of 5 online advertising pioneers that built one of the original ad-serving platforms together, and we’ve spent the past year researching and evaluating POCs of Web3 advertising solutions. Despite Web3’s promise of user empowerment, today’s marketing landscape remains trapped in an outdated system that treats user attention as a commodity and personal data as corporate property. We are changing that.

Our vision is simple but revolutionary: marketing that’s relevant to users, rewards participation, and distributes value fairly. Built natively on Polkadot, our platform transforms those dull moments during wallet connections and transactions into opportunities for meaningful engagement. No intrusive ads, no hidden data collection – just straightforward value exchange where users choose how to participate.

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User-Centric Innovation

What makes our approach different? It starts with putting users truly in control. Through private data vaults, each user decides what information to share and how to share it. They set the revenue split with publishers and receive direct compensation for their attention. Think of it as a personal data economy where you’re finally in charge.

Publisher & Creator Empowerment

For publishers and content creators, we’re introducing tools that feel natural in the Web3 space. Instead of forcing banner ads into dapps, we’ve created interactive experiences that enhance user journeys. Publishers can offer genuine value at key moments, like during transaction confirmations or token swaps, while sharing revenue directly with their engaged users.

The Polkadot Marketing Hub

We’ve reimagined how advertisers connect with audiences. The Polkadot Marketing Hub serves as a central command center where decentralized marketing teams can plan campaigns, track performance, and coordinate with teams for key events – all while respecting user privacy. It is 2025, there is no excuse for manual reporting for digital campaigns. We’ve included a full range of decentralized tools with live reporting for advertisers, agencies and decentralized marketing teams including:

  • Campaign manager and ad builder for programmatic and paid media campaigns,

  • OpenRTB ad-serving integration for programmatic display and digital OOH (billboards)

  • Smart contract based – enter to win sweepstakes and fulfillment engine,

  • KOL campaign manager with performance and sentiment reporting,

  • Influencer portal for influencer to access opportunities, campaigns, and profile.

  • Event tracking tag generator for impression and click tracking on other media,

  • Polling engine to gather user insights and opinions

  • Master calendar to align marketing with key dates from the Events Bounty calendar.

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What excites us most is integrating OpenGov marketing related bounties and treasury referendums with the Polkadot Marketing Hub for verifiable attribution and reporting. Curators can access their bounty dashboard, manage child bounties, schedule voting tied to award distributions for curators, streamlining the process and reporting for bounty curators.

Future of Digital Marketing

This isn’t just about improving digital advertising. It’s about proving that marketing in the Web3 era can be both effective and transparent. That we can build systems where user consent isn’t just a checkbox, but the foundation of every interaction. Where value flows freely and fairly between all participants. The future of digital marketing won’t be built on surveillance and attention extraction. It will be built on choice, fairness, and genuine engagement.

Phased Implementation and Costs

Our phased implementation over the next nine months will deliver basic campaign tools within the first 3 months, then additional enhancements after another 3 months, and a complete system after the final 3 months of development at a total cost of $450,000. For the spend level of a couple KOL campaigns, we can build a customized system that can measure campaign performance across KOLs, sponsorships and ad campaigns; as well as attribute bounty and treasury spends to measure effectiveness and ROI.

Key Milestones

Foundation (Months 1-4)

Core platform architecture
Initial chain integrations
Basic campaign tools
Enhancement (Months 4-6)

Advanced analytics
Additional chain integration
Enhanced user features
Full Launch (Months 7-9)

Complete ecosystem integration
Production deployment
Community onboarding

We invite you to join us in this transformative journey and ask for your vote supporting this as a Polkadot Treasury referendum. Your vote is critical to unlocking the next wave of innovation in digital marketing, where every participant benefits from a truly decentralized and equitable ecosystem.

Please let us know any questions and look forward to hearing your feedback.

2

Where can we learn more about you and your team, and which original ad-serving platform are you referring to?

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You can just drag and drop .jpeg images into the reply box and the forums will upload for you.

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What platform(s) are you planning to use for DSP/exchange/SSP etc.

Also, do you have direct ad tags already integrated with publications at scale, or are you reliant on third parties such as exchanges/ssps?

Look forward to learning more

3

Thanks for your questions @flez! If you don’t mind, let me get back to you shortly before disclosing entity and names. To give some background on our experience, we initially built the backend voting engine for many of the top reality TV shows and game shows. The high bursts of traffic from live television required our backend to process the votes and entries for hundreds of thousands of concurrent users during commercial breaks. We leveraged the high-throughput backend for our ad-serving system, enabling us to pass stress tests and achieve certification with all major publishers, networks, and portals (Tier 1 status included AOL, Yahoo, MSN – later Google, MySpace, Facebook, etc).

We are enhancing our ad-serving system by decentralizing it through TEE enclaves, smart contracts, and IPFS. We do not plan to utilize any web2 DSP, SSP, or RTB partners. Instead, we aim to develop a decentralized RTB system that incorporates an additional participant in the bidding process, namely the user, to facilitate access to targeting data and the distribution of ad revenue. Our solution employs a distinctive combination of Decentralized Identifiers (DID), Dynamic NFTs (not artwork), and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure secure, privacy-preserving targeting. The metadata associated with Dynamic NFTs will reflect user preferences for users and ad placements for publishers, while smart contracts will manage automated revenue sharing. This approach establishes a transparent and auditable system that empowers users with control.

Transformation in how users consume content has been followed by development that extends transformative innovation in advertising. Streaming apps and AI have empowered users with control over the type, amount, timing, and location of consumed content. Decentralized adtech products and services are almost non-existent, but we expect that to change with digital ad revenues projected to reach $840 billion in 2025 and over $1.2 trillion by 2028. Without being too forward or making promises, we believe the Polkadot Marketing Hub will provide the foundation to attract and grow an adtech developer ecosystem.

Let me know if you have any additional questions!

4

I get the intention behind giving users control over their ad data, but I’m skeptical based on how little engagement we’ve seen with similar models. Even with clear opt-in prompts, only about 10 to 25 percent of iOS users choose to share their data.. suggesting most people either don’t care enough or actively avoid managing their data, especially when the tradeoff is just “fewer annoying ads.”

The real challenge seems to be: how do you meaningfully incentivize user participation without adding friction or relying on behavior that historically hasn’t scaled?

Also, without integrations with Web2 DSPs, exchanges, or SSPs, where does the initial ad inventory come from? Why would advertisers participate before there’s a user base, and why would users engage without meaningful demand?

5

You raise valid points about historical user engagement, but I think we’re comparing different paradigms. The iOS opt-in you mentioned shows that even with zero incentives, 25% of users (350M+) still chose to engage with data controls. If that many people will participate for free, imagine the participation rates when users get compensated directly from advertiser spend - and that compensation is significantly higher than what third-party service providers currently receive. When users control their data attributes AND receive their fair share of what advertisers actually pay, the value proposition changes entirely.

We have experience creating these direct value exchanges. Back when there were no standardized banner ad sizes or ad specs for the industry, we helped publishers generate insights using surveys, polls, and promotions. This is why our tools now include these same engagement mechanisms for publishers and dapps. With basic insights from their users, gaming tournaments and minting events in the Polkadot ecosystem could have marketers sponsor gas fees in exchange for watching a 15-second video. These are opted-in young adult males - Millennials and GenZ - who are notoriously the hardest demographic for advertisers to reach.

This isn’t limited to online banners or traditional ad exchanges. DSPs, SSPs, and exchanges aren’t relevant at this stage because we’re building the infrastructure for a fundamentally different model.

6

It’s not about whether some users will opt in.. we already know a minority will.

The real question is: how do you reach the masses in the first place to give them the option to opt in?

Without direct integrations with major publishers, apps, or platforms that already have large user bases, there’s no meaningful distribution channel.

In other words, you can build the platform, but without adoption, its impact will be extremely limited. e.g., you won’t be able to effectively track ROAS, gather meaningful user data, or get users to opt in at scale to manage their preferences in a way that advertisers can actually act on.

So is the goal to request treasury funding for tooling that, while technically sound, may not gain meaningful adoption at scale? If not, I’d love to understand the go-to-market strategy, specifically how you plan to drive distribution and get this into the hands of users and apps at a level that makes the model viable.

Not trying to be contrarian, just trying to understand what I’m missing in the logic.

7

OK, so the treasury only funds technology that is proven and clearly will have adoptioin at scale..? Based on your last comment, 25% of iOS with no incentives shared their data, so with real incentives that 350M users should easily grow to 400-500M users. Is that not viable to your standards?

This reminds me of when we first developed an advanced ad-server that could deliver interactive features and video when the market was still predominately on dial-up modems - and I would hear ‘why would anyone watch videos on their computer when they have TV’.

It would be great to hear your definition of what is web3 marketing, because every point you’ve been trying to make is dependent on web2 platforms. If the ability to track ROAS, gather meaningful user data, or opt-ins - at scale was available or coming soon, then web3 would already be mainstream. So then, if direct integrations are not available, is your solution to wait until they are made available?

You’re only looking at this through a web2 advertising lens, which is why you’re missing what we’re proposing When I think of what advertising might look like in the future, the scene from the movie Minority Report pops into my head… (it sounds like that movie was before your time, there is a scene where Tom Cruise is walking through a mall and the ads on the wall are pitching him as he walks by them). The first time I watched it, I thought it was out of this world and something I’d never see in my lifetime. When I watch it now, blockchain technologies pop in my head and it is (at least a rudimentary form) a plausible goal.

We are proposing to build the infrastructure that connects users, publishers, and advertisers that will position our solution and Polkadot as first mover and spark a movement that drives visionaries and innovators to come build on Polkadot. Our first steps would be working with Polkadot parachains, publishers, and dapps and identify the placements to monetize