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Better ads. Reforming science publishing. Stopping designer fraud. Who would have thought blockchain was the answer?
Blockchain is an odd technology. It’s touted by fans as the solution to everything, and has been trialed for a wild variety of use cases, but the complex nature of the distributed ledger means it’s not always the easiest or cheapest way to solve a problem.
But companies are beginning to find real utility in a wide variety of industries – from ad sales to science publishing and even luxury goods. Here, we speak to three companies in very different sectors that have used blockchain to solve serious challenges.
Ad exchanges can be opaque systems that are difficult for customers to understand, meaning they face high costs and inefficiencies.
To address that, Ben Putley founded Alkimi, a decentralised advertising platform built on the Ethereum Virtual Machine that aims to rebuild that trust through verifiable transparency. As opposed to trusting the black boxes of traditional ad exchanges.
“The current ecosystem is dominated by intermediaries, which increases costs and reduces visibility into where ad spend is going,” said Putley. “Advertisers often don’t know how much of their budget is reaching publishers, and publishers are losing significant revenue to the middlemen.”
Blockchain can address those challenges thanks to its decentralised nature. “With blockchain, every transaction is recorded on a decentralised ledger, so both advertisers and publishers can see exactly where their spend is going and how it’s performing, in real-time,” he added. “This level of transparency and accountability simply isn’t possible with traditional centralised systems.”
Alkimi sits on a Layer 2 scaling solution on Ethereum – a system designed to improve the throughput by bundling multiple transactions together in order to process them on the main blockchain. Practically, this helps reduce transaction fees and avoid network congestion. By using that to build a programmatic ad exchange, Alkimi has made a transparent, cheaper exchange.
“Advertisers use Alkimi to place programmatic bids in real-time, allowing them to engage with audiences more efficiently,” Putley said. “These bids are processed on our blockchain, with every step – including the bid amount, time and winning price – recorded immutably to ensure complete transparency.”
That means publishers know exactly how much they’re earning and how much they’re paying in fees; in traditional models, that can be up to 20%, while Alkimi charges a flat 1.5%. Beyond transparency, using blockchain also allows Alkimi to introduce automation in the clearing and payment process via smart contracts, further reducing costs and boosting efficiency, while also avoiding human errors.
Putley notes that blockchain isn’t a trendy tech term but core to Alkimi’s business. “One of the key differentiators for Alkimi is that we’re not just using blockchain as a buzzword – it’s central to how we deliver better outcomes for advertisers and publishers.”
Philipp Koellinger believes scientific publishing is broken. Scientists don’t get the recognition their work deserves, there’s a replication crisis in research, and the incentive system for peer review is flawed. So he co-founded DeSci Labs in an effort to transform the industry using blockchain and Web3 technologies.
“Science and scientific communication have become more digital over the last few decades, but the internet was not developed to enable a digital version of the scientific record,” he argued.
For example, publishers put up paywalls around academic articles, meaning they’re inaccessible to anyone – including scientists. Plus, URLs break or the content hosted changes, leading to link rot and content drift, with research suggesting that impacts the majority of scientific articles and references.
Web3 technologies, including blockchain, are decentralised and distributed, helping to address such challenges. Koellinger points to IPFS, a distributed file system and content addressing protocol, saying its use of a persistent identifier functions as a digital fingerprint for content being shared, be it documents, data, images or code.
“This fingerprint is impossible to forge, ensuring that users can confirm that the content they intended to access is exactly what they receive,” he said. “Furthermore, several network participants can store and serve the same content using the same identifier, contributing to long-term availability and quick accessibility.”
Beyond that, Web3 technologies allow people to more easily share and access information, while also supporting ownership. “This facilitates the development of systems that can reward referees for their contributions and address several significant issues in the scientific community – for example, reducing the lengthy peer review process and helping editors find qualified referees more easily,” he added.
“Moreover, they could solve the problem of unpaid peer review, which is currently standard and amounts to a multi-billion dollar donation of scientists to commercial publishers every year.”
To address these challenges, DeSci Labs built its Collaborative Open Data Exchange (CODEX) protocol, using open-source blockchain projects. Users can create, upload, and share their research and content thanks to IPFS’ open peer-to-peer network, meaning everything has a persistent identifier, ending content drift and link rot. Beyond that, CODEX uses Ethereum and Optimism to “index” publications on a public ledger, showing who published what and when.
“It is an open-source software anyone can use, fork, or contribute to,” says Koellinger, saying the easiest way to get started is the free DeSci Publish web application.
Kollinger notes that blockchain is just one of many tools DeSci Labs has turned to in order to help reform scientific publishing, with AI used to develop a novelty scores calculator to automatically assess the ideas in a manuscript and the diversity of cited sources in the references.
“The scores provide incentives for novel work to be published and funded, helping to accelerate scientific progress,” he said. “This tool is not designed to replace human judgement but to provide additional data-driven information that users should note are imperfect themselves.”
Is that product really from that designer? Unless you’re an expert, it’s difficult to know – but Gate2Chain is working with IBM to create a system called TRACE. This creates a digital twin of a garment including production timeline, origin of fabric and details about who made it, all tracked in a digital product passport.
That’s just one example of what Gate2Chain can do using blockchain-powered infrastructure, says Bart Olivares, founder and CEO. “One of our key solutions is Story&Value, a plug-and-play platform that leverages blockchain to provide end-to-end traceability while offering a unique digital experience for consumers.”
The system weaves together a public blockchain for scalability and immutability with NFC technology to connect a physical product with a digital twin, so users can access information about it in real time.
Using Story&Value’s platform, brands – Olivares cites examples such as handbags, jewellery and fine art – embed an NFC chip into each product as a digital key. Customers tap that chip with their smartphone to access a blockchain-verified digital passport that can include origin and authenticity data, sustainability credentials, brand engagement features, and even resale or circular economy functions.
That helps fashion and luxury brands address a lack of transparency and traceability with their products and how they are made, gives them a tool to fight back against counterfeiting and fraud, and keeps companies in touch with their consumers after purchase.
“Traditional models fail to connect brands with consumers after the point of sale, limiting resale, repair, and product lifecycle insights,” said Olivares.
He adds that blockchain was the only possible solution thanks to its decentralised, transparent design. “Unlike centralized solutions, blockchain allows all stakeholders (brands, suppliers, consumers) to verify product data without intermediaries,” Olivares said.
“Without blockchain, authenticity verification and real-time traceability would rely on trust-based, centralized databases – which are prone to manipulation and inefficiencies.”
