MAD Scientists Publish Results
How to bring a New Ad-Tech Economy to Life
With the founding of BlockScience, I have had an influx of opportunities to participate in many blockchain projects — far more than I could have hoped to contribute to in a meaningful way. As a decision scientist, I was immediately drawn to the question of how to decide which projects to engage with. Given the relative immaturity of the blockchain space and the uncertainty regarding the best ways to leverage tokenization to improve the efficiency of our economy at a very basic level, I decided to focus on three heuristics:
- Product-Technology fit — does the solution architecture require blockchain? Is there is a working MVP and does the solution provide significant advantage over any non-blockchain solution even accounting for frictions associated with adopting new technologies and tensions when changing behavior in existing businesses?
- Community Engagement — blockchains and smart contracts add value through the automation and auditing of multi-party workflows; to this end, a blockchain enabled application only adds value if all stakeholders in a multi-party workflow buy in. Has the project garnered engagement from stakeholders across roles in the relevant workflow?
- Commitment to Research — in such a young space both technical and business best practices are rapidly evolving; it is important to maintain a balance between iterative development and iterative research. Is ongoing research at both the protocol and economic systems level informing product requirements, technical designs and business decisions?
In the end, the single biggest factor is the team — projects which have assembled top notch technical and business leadership know how to get these three priorities right. It is often a balancing act but a three legged stool is far easier to keep upright.
Today, I have the pleasure of announcing BlockScience’s collaboration with one such team, MAD Network, corresponding with the release of a technical white paper detailing our ongoing research around the MAD Token and its role as a software license for accessing the MAD Network software suite. This work has been produced in close collaboration with Naol Duga Jebessa and Tom Bollich of Madhive who bring to bear great knowledge about blockchain protocols and incentivizing user behaviors, respectively.
The MAD Token Economic Specification is a detailed extension of the MAD Network Whitepaper providing formal definitions for advertising technology concepts which lay critical ground work for both the public and consortium blockchain implementations required by the architecture. The research presented focuses on the aspects of the design which bridge between the public and consortium blockchains as these properties directly impact early design decisions such as the choice of a public blockchain for the MAD Token, as well as the framework and protocol design for the consortium blockchain.
The mathematical analysis focuses on the economic implications of design decisions around the rules for activating MAD token to access the payment rails and the accounting of payments to stakeholders such as publishers, data providers and miners for their participation in the MAD Network ecosystem. The research presented is ongoing and will continue to be made public for the benefit of the advertising technology community. Our future work includes, simulation and analysis of the economic systems based on the derivations presented and the implementation of hybrid simulation-emulation methods to serve as a bridge to the protocol-level implementation.
Special thanks to the Mad Network Project Lead, Madhive CEO Adam Helfgott for dynamically prioritizing the technology, the community, and the research. As of this publication, Madhive is a cash-flow positive advertising technology business and a preliminary implementation of MadNet Books, the payment rail system in MAD Network, is live on a test net hosted by partner Blockdaemon. The advertising technology community’s engagement with blockchain is alive and strong, taking the form of the AdLedger consortium which has been meeting regularly since Q3 2017. The Madhive team has instantiated a formal process for integrating ongoing research efforts across economics, protocols and user experience with agile development of the MAD Network software suite; this research methodology is being used not only for MAD Network but also in the Open GDPR project, an ongoing effort of the AdLedger consortium to provide tools for the Advertising Technology community to meet the regulatory requirements set forth by the EU to govern the management and use of private user data.