61 FUTURESHOCK Blockchain
BLOCKCHAIN GLOSSARY ALTCOIN An alternative cryptocurrency – literally any cryptocurrency that isn’t bitcoin. Popular altcoins include Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano and Litecoin. BITCOIN The first major cryptocurrency, issued in 2009 via a pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. Bitcoin uses blockchain, a distributed ledger, to record the history of all bitcoin transactions. BLOCKCHAIN A digital ledger in which transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly over a distributed system. CRYPTOCURRENCY A decentralised, privately created currency, independent of a central bank which uses encryption to record and verify the transfer of funds. Cryptocurrencies simplify transfer of wealth between individuals. The most popular cryptocurrency is bitcoin. ICO Initial Coin Offering. Similar to an initial public offering (IPO), a method of raising capital using cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Some regulatory bodies have warned that ICO investments are very high risk, and offer little protection for investors. IPFS Interplanetary File System. A peer-to-peer protocol for sharing and long-term archiving of files in a distributed system using blockchain (https://ipfs.io).
anymore with a third-party company running machine-learning algorithms to figure out who people are and what their relationships are.” This technology is at its early stages and MadHive is still intensively researching how its AI agents might interact with outside parties. But given the rate of change in the digital world, it may be a matter of months, not years, before we see blockchain-enabled media applications popping up. Being able to connect consumers with brands and content – and directly, not through a content aggregator or service provider – will create new opportunities for brands, advertisers and creators, and may threaten many of our existing business models. “Ultimately we’d like to insert this into the ad tech system as it exists today. Or we may have to change things a lot. We’re still figuring out the best steps to approach that. It’s a bit like how the World Wide Web was in ‘96 or ‘97: you’re going to be able to do all these amazing things, but first you’re going to have to build it.” WE KNEW OTT ADVERTISING WAS BROKEN
directly, without having to use that intermediary, and no one else is going to be getting that bitcoin except you.” Last summer, MadHive partnered with US media corporation Tegna, the broadcasting and digital half of what had previously been Gannett. Tegna owns 46 US television stations. “We knew blockchain was going to change things, and we knew OTT advertising was broken. We wondered if we could leapfrog the current tech stack and go into blockchain. So we built an OTT company and are now pushing all that we have learned into the blockchain world. One of the big things for us is that using blockchain you get to reimagine everything. “We see this as a privacy-first ad tech system. Imagine a system living in your TV which is an ad server. It knows all about you and pulls ads to you, but it never reveals any of your information outside your ecosystem. We see privacy as a human right.” Bollich sees a use case where AI bots on a consumer’s device would collect information about a consumer and then share that privately with interested brands and publishers, directly. “If you start reshaping how advertising works and what brands and publishers really want at the end of the day, you can really bring users and brands together. You won’t have some big bucket of data in the middle
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