AdEx (ADX) is a blockchain-based platform for transparent and privacy-focused ad exchange, enabling advertisers and publishers to trade ad space.

The growing adoption of Web3 technologies presents a challenge for companies looking to reach new users efficiently. Many traditional advertising platforms lack transparency and are vulnerable to fraud, making it difficult for advertisers to maximize their budgets. A solution is needed that ensures accountability while connecting Web3 companies with engaged audiences. By leveraging blockchain technology, an ad platform can offer verifiable reporting, reduce inefficiencies, and optimize ad spending. This is precisely what AdEx delivers—a decentralized advertising network that enhances trust, prevents fraud, and bridges the gap between Web3 businesses and their future users.

What is AdEx (ADX)?

AdEx was founded in 2017 by Ivo Georgiev and Dimo Stoyanov, aiming to create a decentralized advertising exchange that eliminates fraud and improves transparency. The project quickly gained traction, raising over $10 million in its ICO. In 2018, the AdEx platform launched, securing ADX token listings on major exchanges like Binance and Huobi, while the team continued refining its protocol.

By 2019, AdEx integrated OUTPACE channels, AdEx Registry, and Market to enhance security and scalability. The platform achieved over 165 million ad impressions and expanded token listings. The following year marked AdEx’s entry into DeFi with the introduction of staking, gasless staking, and further platform enhancements.

In 2021, AdEx evolved beyond a simple ad network, initiating plans for AdEx V5 with lower fees and improved security. The team also launched Ambire Wallet, raising $2.5 million in funding and introducing the WALLET token. The company rebranded to Ambire, reflecting its broader ambitions in digital identity and advertising.

2022 focused on user feedback and transitioning into a full blockchain-based Demand-Side Platform (DSP). In 2023, AdEx relaunched as a Web3 advertising marketplace, integrating Ambire Wallet’s login SDK and strengthening its community.

Entering 2024, AdEx released an upgraded platform with advanced targeting, zero-knowledge privacy features, AI-driven optimization, and an improved staking model. AdEx is committed to transparency, privacy, and decentralization, aiming to redefine digital advertising by providing advertisers and publishers with a trust-minimized, open ecosystem that ensures fairness, efficiency, and fraud-resistant transactions.

How Does AdEx Work? Protocol and Components

The AdEx Protocol is a decentralized advertising system designed to create a transparent, fraud-resistant, and efficient digital ad marketplace. It connects advertisers (demand side) and publishers (supply side) directly, eliminating unnecessary intermediaries and reducing costs. The protocol leverages blockchain technology, smart contracts, and layer-2 scaling solutions to ensure secure, real-time transactions and automated campaign execution. It introduces OUTPACE, an off-chain unidirectional trustless payment channel, to facilitate micropayments between advertisers and publishers while maintaining the trustless nature of blockchain. This approach ensures fair compensation, eliminates payment disputes, and enables high-throughput processing of advertising transactions.

Each advertising campaign in AdEx is represented as a financial commitment on a smart contract. Advertisers create campaigns with a total budget, specifying parameters such as ad formats, targeting criteria, and the maximum price per impression or click. These campaigns operate on OUTPACE payment channels, which allow advertisers to make real-time payments to multiple publishers per ad interaction (e.g., impressions or clicks). Payment channels are maintained by validators, responsible for tracking ad events, signing state transitions, and ensuring compliance with the protocol’s rules.

A campaign starts when an advertiser deposits funds into an OUTPACE channel, which acts as a locked payment stream. Publishers then bid for these funds in real-time based on user engagement. Ad impressions, clicks, and interactions are tracked by validators, who sign off-chain event messages. A new state is proposed and signed by a supermajority (≥2/3) of validators before being enforceable on-chain. This ensures that publishers receive fair compensation while advertisers only pay for verified interactions.

Validators play a critical role in ensuring accuracy and fairness within the protocol. Each campaign has its own validator set, comprising an advertiser-side validator and a publisher-side validator. These validators monitor the campaign, sign transactions, and ensure compliance with state transition rules, which prevent fund manipulation. The validator stack includes observers, entities that track ad events but do not necessarily participate in validation. Observers collect and verify ad interaction data, enhancing reporting transparency.

The AdEx protocol’s use of layer-2 scaling solutions allows it to achieve near-instant transactions without overloading the blockchain. By keeping most ad event data off-chain and only committing finalized transactions on-chain, AdEx ensures cost efficiency and minimizes gas fees. The protocol also includes built-in campaign health tracking, which allows publishers to assess whether advertisers are properly funding their campaigns. If campaign health drops below a threshold, publishers can pause ad delivery until the advertiser provides adequate funding.

Source: adex.network

At the end of a campaign, an advertiser can close the channel, withdrawing unused funds and paying a small cancellation fee to the publisher-side validator. If validators fail to sign new states due to downtime or misbehavior, publishers can immediately stop serving ads for that campaign. This trust-minimized model ensures that all parties operate fairly and transparently.

AdEx’s protocol aims to eliminate inefficiencies in digital advertising, providing a scalable, fraud-resistant ecosystem for advertisers and publishers alike.

Components

The AdEx Protocol consists of multiple components that work together to create a transparent, decentralized, and efficient advertising ecosystem. These components ensure smooth interactions between advertisers, publishers, and validators while maintaining security, privacy, and real-time payments through blockchain technology. The key elements include AdEx Core, Market, Validator Stack, AdView, and Identity.

The Core is the backbone of the AdEx ecosystem. It is built on blockchain technology to facilitate trustless and decentralized transactions between advertisers and publishers. The core implements OUTPACE channels, which are off-chain unidirectional payment channels that manage financial transactions in advertising campaigns. Each advertiser creates a campaign, mapping it to a single OUTPACE channel with a specific deposit. This deposit is used to compensate publishers based on real-time ad interactions. The core ensures that campaigns are executed with predefined rules, including campaign duration, impression pricing, and targeting specifications. The Ethereum-based implementation, adex-protocol-eth, currently serves as the primary deployment, with ongoing research into alternatives like Cosmos and Polkadot for future scalability.

The Market acts as a matching engine between advertisers and publishers, facilitating the discovery and trading of ad space. It is a RESTful service hosted by AdEx Network OÜ, tracking all active OUTPACE channels to ensure campaign validity and the presence of functional validators. The Market continuously monitors campaign health, ensuring that at least two-thirds of validators remain online for accurate state updates. To enhance privacy and exclusivity, publishers and advertisers can operate their own private instances of the Market, limiting campaign visibility to selected participants. This flexibility provides a more controlled advertising environment, reducing unnecessary competition and increasing profitability for publishers.

The Validator Stack is a crucial off-chain component that ensures ad event verification, state management, and analytical reporting. Validators are responsible for tracking impressions, clicks, and campaign interactions, filtering fraudulent events, and generating reports based on real-time ad engagement. The stack maintains campaign-specific OUTPACE channels, signing new states as micropayments are processed. It also offers RESTful APIs to provide reports, insights, and event tracking. The validator stack is modular, allowing different implementations to optimize performance for specific advertising flows.

The AdView is the front-end component responsible for ad selection, event tracking, and targeting. It runs seamlessly within the browser, operating alongside modern frameworks like React or as an <iframe> embedded in publisher web pages. AdView fetches relevant ad campaigns from the Market, prioritizing bids based on price, contextual targeting, and user behavior. It generates ad interaction events (impressions, clicks, conversions) and sends them to validators and observers. The contextual targeting system ensures that user data remains private by executing ad selection within the user’s browser, preventing external tracking. The system also includes ad blacklisting, allowing users to exclude specific ads, improving user experience while giving publishers insights into underperforming creatives.

The Identity Layer, originally integrated within AdEx, has been replaced by Ambire Wallet, a smart contract wallet designed to enhance security and usability. It allows advertisers and publishers to interact with the Ethereum network without needing ETH for gas fees. It supports multi-device authentication, smart contract-based automation for ad revenue withdrawals, and pre-approved tokens like USDC and ADX for campaign deposits. This abstraction eliminates technical barriers, making blockchain-based advertising more accessible.

Source: adex whitepaper

AdEx Use Cases

AdEx enables advertisers to reach their target audience more effectively while allowing publishers to maximize their ad revenue. Below are three key use cases where AdEx delivers value:

• Decentralized Digital Advertising: Traditional ad networks rely on centralized intermediaries that take high commissions and expose advertisers to fraudulent practices like click farms and bot traffic. AdEx provides a trust-minimized protocol where advertisers and publishers interact directly through smart contracts. This ensures full transparency in ad performance, real-time micropayments, and zero reliance on intermediaries, making it an ideal solution for brands, agencies, and Web3 projects.
• Ad Monetization for Publishers: Publishers often struggle with low revenue shares and delayed payouts in centralized ad networks. AdEx allows direct monetization, where publishers receive instant payments per impression or click. The transparent reporting system ensures publishers receive fair traffic compensation without hidden fees. Additionally, AdEx supports contextual and behavioral targeting, helping publishers serve more relevant ads while maintaining user privacy.
• Web3 and Crypto Marketing: Crypto and Web3 projects face ad restrictions on major platforms. AdEx offers a censorship-resistant advertising network tailored for DeFi, NFTs, and blockchain startups. Advertisers can target crypto-savvy users, promote token sales, or drive DeFi adoption while ensuring compliance with on-chain advertising rules.

AdEx Products

AdEx offers a suite of products designed to redefine digital advertising in the Web3 era. From decentralized ad exchanges to AI-powered analytics and privacy-focused targeting, AdEx aims to deliver efficiency, transparency, and security across all advertising operations. Each product is crafted to address specific challenges, including ad fraud prevention, campaign optimization, and user privacy. Below are the core products that make up the AdEx ecosystem.

AdEx DSP

AdEx DSP is a self-serve, programmatic advertising platform tailored for Web3 brands, blockchain startups, and digital advertisers. It allows advertisers to launch campaigns in minutes, ensuring real-time bidding, transparency, and fraud prevention. Unlike traditional ad networks that charge high commissions and offer limited targeting, AdEx DSP operates on a 7% fee structure (or 4% for ADX token payments), giving advertisers more value for their budget.

The platform supports multiple payment methods, including stablecoins (USDC, USDT, DAI) and fiat via crypto on-ramps, with a minimum campaign budget of $300. AdEx DSP utilizes OUTPACE, a Layer-2 payment protocol, to process instant ad payments and verify interactions through validators. Additionally, advanced analytics powered by AdView ensures fraud detection and campaign optimization, offering deep insights into impressions, CTR, and spending efficiency. Advertisers can run display ads across various banner sizes while benefiting from contextual targeting and automated bidding strategies.

Source: adex.network

AdEx AURA

AdEx AURA is an AI-powered onchain activity analyzer, designed to enhance user engagement in Web3. This innovative tool processes blockchain activity using large language models (LLMs) to generate personalized recommendations for DeFi users, traders, and Web3 enthusiasts. AURA analyzes user interactions, such as token transfers, DEX activity, and yield farming, to suggest relevant platforms, services, or investment opportunities.

Unlike traditional recommendation engines, AURA shifts incentives toward users rather than publishers, ensuring fair, AI-driven advertising without compromising privacy. When integrated with the AdEx ad network, AURA prioritizes sponsored yet relevant suggestions, allowing platforms to promote services while respecting user intent. It has applications in DEX trading, yield farming optimization, swap/bridge recommendations, and app catalogs, providing real-time insights for DeFi users. Future updates will introduce ADX staking mechanisms, enabling advertisers to boost their visibility while maintaining security and trust in Web3 advertising.

Source: adex.network

AdEx AI

AdEx AI integrates machine learning and deep learning algorithms to enhance campaign performance, fraud detection, and ad creative optimization. By leveraging adaptive algorithms, AdEx AI optimizes targeting and bidding strategies, ensuring ads reach the right audience while minimizing costs. Real-time budget allocation and clustering techniques enable efficient ad spend distribution, maximizing conversions for advertisers.

Ad fraud prevention is a core component, with AI-driven anomaly detection identifying bot traffic, click farms, and fake impressions before they impact campaign performance. Additionally, AI-powered creative generation refines ad visuals, copywriting, and calls to action, ensuring higher engagement rates. The ability to analyze historical performance data and conduct large-scale A/B testing allows AdEx AI to continuously optimize ad campaigns, setting a new standard for data-driven Web3 advertising.

Source: adex.network

AdEx ZK

AdEx ZK is a privacy-preserving advertising solution that eliminates intrusive tracking while maintaining effective audience targeting. Built on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), this Web3-powered targeting engine protects user data while allowing advertisers to deliver highly relevant ads. Unlike traditional ad platforms, which rely on cookies and behavioral tracking, AdEx ZK ensures all targeting operations happen directly on the user’s device.

Users can curate their ad experience by selecting preferred ad categories, allowing advertisers to fine-tune their targeting based on self-selected interests rather than mined personal data. This approach guarantees GDPR and CCPA compliance, as no user data is stored or shared. Additionally, AdEx ZK introduces a reward mechanism, where users earn ADX tokens to interact with ads. This creates a win-win ecosystem where advertisers reach engaged audiences, publishers monetize their inventory efficiently, and users retain full control over their privacy.

Source: adex.network

What is the ADX Coin?

ADX is the native token of AdEx, used for staking, payments, and governance incentives. Its total supply counts 150 million units, of which 144.04 million are already in circulation (February 2025).

The token is fully distributed among individual holders. A significant portion of ADX is staked (41.61%), contributing to the security and decentralization of the network, while 45.42% is held on exchanges and 12.97% in individual wallets. The token’s current market cap is around $20 million, with a trading volume of $9 million. ADX is a fundamental component of AdEx, ensuring seamless transactions between advertisers, publishers, and validators while maintaining transparency and efficiency.

Source: adex.network

Staking ADX tokens allows users to actively participate in securing the AdEx network while earning rewards. Users can stake their tokens through Ambire Wallet or the AdEx Staking Portal, benefiting from a 4.56% APY with a mandatory 20-day unbonding period. Staking enhances network decentralization, strengthens validator trust, and reduces ADX token volatility by removing circulating supply. Validators play a critical role in transaction validation, fraud prevention, and maintaining the integrity of the platform. To prevent fraudulent activities, validators must put up ADX as collateral, ensuring accountability and reliability.

ADX also provides governance rights to stakers, allowing them to vote on protocol upgrades and strategic decisions. Additionally, advertisers using ADX for campaign payments receive discounted fees, reducing costs from 7% to 4%. By staking and using ADX within the AdEx platform, users contribute to the ecosystem’s growth while benefiting from incentives, security, and governance participation.

Is ADX a Good Investment?

ADX offers a unique value proposition in Web3 advertising by prioritizing transparency, decentralization, and fraud prevention. Its staking mechanism enhances network security while providing token holders with governance rights and rewards, making it an attractive utility token. However, the project faces challenges, such as competition from established digital advertising giants and the adoption hurdles of blockchain-based ad solutions. While AdEx’s commitment to innovation and privacy is promising, its long-term success depends on broader industry acceptance and the ability to scale effectively in a rapidly evolving ad tech landscape.

How to Own ADX?

To own ADX, you can use the services of a centralized crypto exchange. Start by creating a Gate.io account and get it verified and funded. Then ,you are ready to go through the steps to buy ADX.

News on AdEx

As announced on 29 January 2025 via the official AdEx blog, the company unveiled its 2025 roadmap for AdEx AURA, its AI-powered onchain activity analyzer. The roadmap introduces three major milestones: V.1.0 will launch a prototype DeFi strategy engine, V.2.0 will integrate real-time market insights, and V.3.0 will transform AURA into a fully autonomous AI agent capable of executing personalized Web3 strategies. Set for release in the coming weeks, AURA aims to revolutionize DeFi by helping users maximize returns and navigate Web3 seamlessly.

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