How Alkimi is Fixing the ‘Opaque’ Online Advertising Model With AdFi

Decentralized blockchain infrastructure promises to break monopolies, do away with gatekeepers and render opaque processes transparent—and one industry where it’s sorely needed is online advertising, according to decentralized ad exchange Alkimi.

“Intermediaries take fees of up to 40 to 80%, so if you are Nike and you want to put an ad on CNN, 40 to 80% of your dollar is lost,” according to the firm’s CEO Ben Putley. That means advertisers lose out on spending power, and publishers aren’t getting the money they need to fund journalism and other content.

“The reason that happens is because the marketplace is largely totally opaque,” Putley explained. Repeated studies have uncovered “rampant” levels of fraud, with industry figures suggesting up to $100 billion is lost globally. Opaque supply chains mean brands can end up paying for impressions that weren’t seen by the target audience.

Built atop the Sui network, Alkimi records all data related to marketing campaigns on an open and tamperproof ledger—meaning that both advertisers and publishers can monitor how budgets are being spent in real time.

Streamlining this “AdFi” process can also mean each dollar goes further. Research from eMarketer found almost a third of U.S. advertising spend goes to intermediaries owing to behind-the-scenes auctions.

“We provide more revenue to people that are selling ads,” Putley said, adding that, “We allow media buyers to get more media for their money and distribute that to people that use the internet.”

Already, Alkimi’s platform is used by brands including Coca-Cola, Dell, Cathay Pacific, Meta, Sky, Bupa, Kraken, PayPal, TikTok, and American Express. For EV brand Polestar’s connected TV campaigns, Alkimi claims to have achieved Nielsen-verified results showing a 34% increase in sales intent, a 24% lift in brand association, 99% viewability, and a 96% video completion rate. For AWS video campaigns, Alkimi delivered a claimed 68% reduction in cost per thousand impressions (CPM) together with a 19% increase in video completion rate.

Alkimi and Walrus

Alikimi uses the Sui Stack as its underlying blockchain infrastructure, including decentralized data layer Walrus, data security layer Seal and verifiable compute layer Nautilus.

“Instead of relying on one provider, Walrus spreads data across a distributed network of nodes—ensuring data is always available, with every byte verifiable onchain,” said Rebecca Simmonds, Managing Executive of the Walrus Foundation, adding that it enables Alkimi to “keep every impression, every click, every transaction auditable and verifiable.”

According to Walrus, the ad platform is now processing over 25 million impressions per day—with a total of 3.5 billion transactions completed so far.

“The ad market is responsible for 200 to 500 million transactions per minute globally,” Putley said, “So there’s a lot of headroom in what we’re doing.”

With billions of clicks, impressions, and transactions flowing through the adtech system daily, storing and reproducing the full volume of execution data on chain was too slow and expensive an option for Alkimi.

Implementing Walrus and the Sui Stack has given Alkimi the infrastructure to handle massive volumes of data without compromising on speed, cost or auditability, the ad platform said.

“The decentralization and the scale of that decentralization across their layer-1 combined with the speed of the consensus mechanism, the ability to store data in a secure, permanent, decentralized way on Walrus, the ability to secure that data using Seal and the ability to validate off-chain transactions and processes using Nautilus have meant it’s the perfect home for us to scale AdFi,” Putley said in a recent interview.

The firm’s engineering team added that Alkimi’s integration with Walrus was “seamless,” with “clear, well-organised documentation” that meant the team “spent less time troubleshooting and more time building.”

Advertising evolved

This new approach also comes at a time when consumers want greater levels of privacy online—and have become increasingly wary of intrusive cookies monitoring their browsing habits around the web.

Meanwhile, businesses worldwide are increasingly seeking value for money from their advertising efforts. Clearer data that shows how their spots have performed can be critical when deciding what future campaigns should look like.

Alkimi says that its solution is compatible with a growing push to regulate adtech, with the Digital Services Act in Europe now introducing stricter disclosure requirements.

“Cookies are disappearing, device IDs have largely disappeared from mobile phones,” said Putley. “There needs to be a new way for people to monetize data, to pay for data that’s valuable for their business. And for me, Walrus is a very nice solution for that.”