According to a
recent report
by eMarketer, digital media accounts for 43.5% of investments in the $628.63 billion market. While growth in the digital advertising ecosystem is booming, the most essential stakeholders (advertiser and publishers) are increasingly frustrated. They’re facing an increasingly-apparent reality: the industry has a transparency problem.
In an age where measuring the performance of ad campaigns is paramount, marketers are unable to fully understand the value they deliver. A dirty little secret of the digital media business is that ad fraud is on the rise due to bot traffic or nonhuman digital traffic. Data is the key to measuring performance, but in advertising it’s trapped and siloed in black box technologies, causing data disagreements and opening the door for fraudulent activities.
The result? Wasted time and money, plus erosion of trust among supply chain partners.
Pithia is pleased to announce our investment in LA-based blockchain startup
Lucidity
, who aims to improve the authenticity of digital advertising analytics through a neutral, decentralized shared ledger. The company’s blockchain protocol empowers marketers to resolve data discrepancies so billing is faster, fraud is prevented by flagging fake traffic sources, waste is identified, and campaigns are optimized for performance.
Today, Lucidity is a scalable, sidechain infrastructure (known as Layer 2) that can handle the high processing speeds and privacy needs of digital advertising. Currently, the Lucidity sidechain implementation uses sharding to scale the system and a Plasma implementation to ensure the system remains secure.
The protocol currently runs on Ethereum, but they’ve found it’s not enough. Enter
RChain
, the third generation of blockchain.
Lucidity will develop an RChain-compatible version to further it’s positioning as a multi- and cross-chain solution supporting RChain, Ethereum, and others. Tracking high volumes of data processed by Lucidity will showcase the scalability of RChain and will provide the necessary components for digital advertisers to move their business onto the RChain blockchain.
Here’s what Lucidity co-founder and CTO Miguel Morales had to say:
We’re very excited to expand our Layer 2 technology to the premiere root chain: RChain. RChain allows us to build our products without having to deal with fluctuating fee prices or performance of the underlying chain. RChain supports a scale much higher than other chains, allowing Layer 2 apps to be that much more reliable and efficient.
Lucidity is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab’s Blockchain Working Group
pilot program
, which provides real-world environments for testing products and services using the technology. Winner of the
Blockchain Startup of 2018
award by The Blocks, Lucidity has already secured a variety of customers and partners including GameStop, Viamedia, The Richards Group, Giant Spoon, and more.
This marks our fourth investment in recent months as we continue to develop the underpinnings of the blockchain 3.0 ecosystem. The RChain mainnet launch is slated for Q4 2018, keep an eye out for much more to come!
If you’re working on a project that can bring value to RChain or the entire blockchain ecosystem, please send referrals to
pitches@pithia.com. Or, if you’re interested in investing in our fund as a Limited Partner, please email
investors@pithia.com.
We support all investors and portfolio companies with our full suite of services including finance, accounting, market/company analysis and due diligence, program management, and legal support. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more.
