Blockchain-based advertising is not a tech experiment. It is the transparent supply chain.

We launched Alkimi four years ago to solve the issues programmatic advertising faces: high fees and lack of transparency. A blockchain is a strong solution for that, and it's become more so as the technology has matured over the last 16 or 17 years. As a blockchain company and an ad-tech company, we sit B2C and B2B. We do content production, plan and book ads at scale in London, work with big agencies including Publicis, partner with Coca-Cola and traditional publishers, and increasingly with crypto publishers.

We charge lower fees. If you're buying ads, you get more media for your money. If you're selling ads, you get paid more for the ads you're selling. Beyond fees, there's nothing better for transparency than an immutable record of transactions. The ledger lets buyers and sellers see what fees are being taken and where. You don't need to trust the data; trustless is the word that sounds odd until you realise it means the data is verified independently. You can query down to a log level. The granularity offered to buyers and sellers is unmatched.

The big blocker for a long time was regulation in the US: regulating by enforcement rather than inviting the sector in to understand the application of blockchain to any market. That's changed with the change in US leadership. Beyond regulation, the harder barrier is the difference between explaining something and someone experiencing it. The proof that you could work from home as effectively as in the office made commuting and ironing your shirt seem painful. Once people experience using a blockchain to buy and sell ads, the old way starts to look less sensible.

The unit-of-experience matters. Education is one thing; experiencing the system for yourself is another. Once people have the second, the case makes itself.

If you start to pay for ad campaigns using stablecoins (USDT, USDC, others), there's yield available on those stablecoins while they sit. The marketing budget for a big brand, or the dollars a media agency is responsible for, doesn't just get spent; it earns while it's idle. The system becomes additive rather than extractive, which the incumbent model is not (incumbents charge a fee, value comes out). We call it AdFi internally, by analogy with DeFi. The ability for marketing budget to work for you twice could be transformative.

Selling features (transparency, low fees) was where we started, and those didn't translate easily into a media plan. Where does transparency and less rights fit into a meeting? We packaged the same features into a product: 100% share of screen. We can buy every ad unit on a page (similar to a high-impact format, but through existing IAB formats). Our net bids are high because our fees are low, so we can be very competitive across the auctions we're submitting bids in. The product is excellent for portfolio companies with multiple brands bidding against each other and cannibalising bids, and for luxury brands that don't want to be seen against other brands (Rimowa not wanting to be seen against Louis Vuitton, even though they're inside the same LVMH parent).

We start at the frontline (planning and buying), prove the case to the planner and buyer, work up through account directors and trading directors. In some cases we deal directly with the brand (Coca-Cola is a partner; James, our co-founder, worked at IPG and was one of the first people to test with AWS). The selling principle: put off the first no for as long as possible. In software sales, getting the no from a senior stakeholder kills the deal. Putting it off long enough means the results speak for themselves and the yes becomes inevitable.

When we have the brand and the agency on board together, the transparency of our fees stops creating contention between them. With Kraken, whose agency is Media Hub, we speak to both Kraken and Media Hub, helping the agency deliver and providing service directly to the client. Top-down meets bottom-up, all stakeholders agreeing, nobody saying no. That generally expedites things significantly.

Coming from ad-tech (I came from ad-tech; Charlie, our co-founder, came from ad-tech, helping build the Virgin and Sky Media TV ad product) and then learning blockchain to solve that problem is different from coming from blockchain and trying to solve ad-tech. We're born vampires: we understood the market, we weren't bitten and became them. The analogy isn't perfect, but the point is that we built the technology to solve a problem we already understood from inside.

When we speak to Kraken (large crypto exchange) we understand how they think about blockchain. We also understand ad-tech, and how deal-making is done in advertising. The combination is rare.

We wanted the way you work with us to feel familiar. IAB ad formats. The planning and buying process you already know. We help with plans and audience-finding. The differences are on the back end.

The best brands know when to innovate and they do it deliberately. Blockchain is approaching an inflection point worth taking seriously. The case is now record-breaking ETFs, a growing groundswell of adoption, fees genuinely lower than incumbents, and exact visibility into where the media spend went. We look for inquisitive marketers, meet them where they are, and take them on the path without rushing them. If a campaign blows up, all the work to get them on was wasted. No one's getting fired for buying ads on Meta; you might get fired for a blockchain campaign that went wrong.

The discipline is doing the boring things well. The reports when they're due. The platform visibility to see campaign performance. The service level you'd expect from any partner. Under-promise and over-deliver.

Big crypto brands historically did big endorsement deals (Formula One teams, football clubs) and spent on performance marketing through affiliates and social platforms. They hadn't looked at the open web seriously for brand awareness or change in purchase intent. The open web is a key part of the funnel and they were missing the intent layer. Now brands are looking at the open web in a much more significant way, tying my logo is on the Formula One car through to this is what it cost me to convert a customer with proper attribution. SMEs with massive budgets, resilient businesses, real demand from the audience. Crypto publishers can capitalise on that demand, and we can help brands capitalise on the attention these websites earn.

It doesn't matter that the marketplace is on a blockchain. It matters that the markets are efficient. When you buy something, you don't describe the wallet or the chain to your friends; you just bought what you wanted. Peter Thiel made the point that technology is good when it becomes invisible and feels like magic. That's where we want to be. Where blockchains have been sold wrong is on transactions per second, on you can build anything on our platform. Who gives a shit? Specific purpose for infrastructure removes the high barrier to entry. You come to us, you buy ads, or you come to us, you sell ads. Boringly delivered.

UX is the issue Web3 has. How do you get a wallet, how do you put money on it? In the past you had to send something in an envelope to someone you met on Reddit and hope a bit of Bitcoin showed up. The rails are much better. Even so, the recent wave of speculation on tokens with virtually zero value has created barriers (Telegram bots, pump.fun, slippage, liquidity) where every sentence assumes knowledge that isn't there. Suck the barriers away and people use it.

The trajectory: blockchain wallets are being created at a quicker rate than the internet and mobile phones were adopted. Standing on the shoulders of giants. The path is that stablecoins become how you pay for things over the next five to ten years. The transfer of value is easier than the bank we already use. We tried to send a transaction from America recently through traditional banking and it took two days because of the time difference and weekend closures. The same on-chain would have been minutes for two dollars. The natural progression is easier, fewer people involved, lower fees, money arrives sooner. The fact that there are no take-backs in crypto frightens people; that's part of why the rails matter, and part of why the work we're doing on a familiar ad-buying experience matters.

The rate at which adoption is happening was hard to anticipate. Six years ago crypto was difficult to get your hands on. The President hadn't created his own token. TradFi institutions have launched ETFs that captured more dollars than any ETFs in history. That wasn't on my four-year bingo card. If adoption continues at this rate, everyone will use it. There's still a cliché in crypto where everyone says good morning, because we're still early. That's 100% true.