Fractal: With Polkadot against the duopoly of Google and Facebook

The advertising market is primarily controlled by two data octopuses: Google and Facebook. Fractal wants to break this duopoly and relies on the technology of Polkadot. We got an exclusive look at the draft whitepaper due for release on February 4th.

Fractal wants to revolutionize the internet – specifically: the advertising business on the web

This is now firmly in the hands of a few major players. Namely Google and Facebook, which have built up a duopoly in advertising on the Internet. This also applies to the data of advertisers. If you want to place targeted advertising, you have to rely on the data collecting octopus. Fractal now wants to contrast the centralized advertising business with a blockchain-based alternative. The mission: to dissolve the asymmetrical distribution of information on the web and make user data a common good without violating the privacy of the individual user. The ubiquitous cookies, which document the surfing behavior of users across websites, should be a thing of the past.

Bitcoin Era allows us to carry out many transactions on the network at low cost. This makes it possible for the first time to resolve the contradiction between user data protection and data verifiability. This means that users control their own advertising-relevant data and thus also control access to this data, data buyers such as publishers or advertisers can check the authenticity. Other systems either solve this centrally – and are therefore not open and less user-friendly – or the data cannot be verified. We can now resolve this contradiction for the first time, explains Fractal founder and CEO Julian Leitloff to BTC-ECHO.

Tomorrow, February 4th, the start-up plans to publish the draft white paper for the Fractal Protocol. BTC-ECHO had an exclusive opportunity to take a look in advance.

Fractal: White Paper Draft

The whitepaper describes an ecosystem whose participants can be divided into five different roles: advertisers, users, verifiers, insurers and witnesses.

The advertisers publish an application (Ad Buy) in the fractal protocol, which must contain the following information: the target group (e.g. nationality, age range, interest), the desired user reaction (e.g. downloading an app or taking out a subscription) the price, which is paid by the advertiser for every successful user interaction (bid price) as well as the total budget for the campaign.

The advertisers deposit a portion of the planned campaign budget in a trust wallet, the Ad Escrow. This is to prevent spam attacks.

Users keep control over their data

The users always retain sovereignty over their data. You decide what information you want to share. This is where the witnesses come in. These “attesters” are responsible for verifying the user data and issuing references (“credentials”). One way of creating and managing decentralized credentials comes, for example, from the start-up KILT with which Fractal cooperates . KILT also relies on polkadot.

While the witnesses guarantee the authenticity of the user data, the verifiers check that the user interactions are also authentic. If this is the case, the author transfers the bid price for the interaction to a separate escrow wallet, the arbitrage escrow. In this way, Fractal wants to tackle the virulent problem of fraud in the advertising business, for example in the form of fake click figures.