Incent and ConsenSys Partner To Create A Decentralized Protocol For Digital Advertising

Incent, the Australian behind crypto-powered View to Earn (V2E) marketing, has partnered with ConsenSys to build the Decentralized Engagement Protocol (DEP). By using blockchain to resolve the engagement to spend attribution challenge, the DEP has the potential to disrupt the $220 billion digital advertising industry. Incent is also working with Run The Chain as part of their first cohort of incubated projects to promote the DEP’s go-to-market strategy.

“Decentralized marketing is a game-changing example of how Web3 can transform inefficient and ineffective Web2.0 solutions,” said Claudio Lisco, Director of Strategic Initiatives at ConsenSys. “Online advertising is clearly no longer fit for purpose and the opportunity is to build a technology that enables commerce to access grassroots influencers, at scale, across all media and rewards all parties fairly and automatically for their contribution to the value creation process.”                                                   

The Web2 advertising model is broken for advertisers and consumers

The exponential growth of online content has driven constant, aggressive competition for consumers’ attention. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with algorithmically targeted ads based on their browsing habits and personal data and in the Web2 world, time and awareness, which are the prerequisites for a marketing conversion, are scarce and valuable resources.                                

Research shows that Influencer marketing is a much more effective tactic for achieving consumer engagement than the dominant, data-driven approaches, because Influencers (particularly those with smaller audiences) tend to have loyal followers, who value their authenticity and therefore trust their recommendations. A perfect combo for conversion.

Web2 marketing strategies and software solutions have failed to organise and aggregate influencers in order for marketers to be able access and employ  them, at scale. And thus display ads are the dominant tactic despite their inefficiencies.

The Incent and ConsenSys partnership to create the Decentralized Engagement Protocol aims to change all that. And it’s just the beginning.                                           

DEP’s successful proof-of-concept that outperformed Facebook ad model

Incent piloted its View 2 Earn (V2E) technology in early 2020 as a Web2 app that provided digital content streamers with a plug’n’play means of rewarding viewership through incentivised calls to action (CTAs). When a consumer engaged with a CTA, their attention was moved off-content to a digital property, where a commercial sponsor secured their permissioned engagement. Every time this occurred, the commercial beneficiary automatically funded a micropayment of crypto tokens to both consumer and creator.                                   

In just nine months the pilot product grew from 1 to 330,000 users. Viewers have enjoyed being rewarded for their attention and streamers have seen their viewing statistics wallet balances soar due to the commercial engagements that V2E triggered. Over the duration of the pilot, V2E secured Click Through Rates (CTRs) 10x superior to that of Facebook.                                            

The DEP is expanding on this pilot to become a fully decentralized Web3 protocol that rewards not only streamers, but every party involved in the digital marketing process.                                                    

“The Attention Economy is broken and Web2 doesn’t have the tools to fix it,” said Rob Wilson, Incent founder and CEO. “Advertisers are looking for more effective solutions and there’s a growing army of content creators looking for better ways to grow their audience and monetize their work. Working with ConsenSys will secure the technology mix to deliver an in-content marketing solution that works for everyone. The DEP will be qualitatively better, fairer, and more effective at incentivising and rewarding marketing outcomes, from engagement right through to purchase, with zero fraud, data security or privacy risk for users.”

How the DEP protocol works and the ConsenSys tools behind it     

The goal of the DEP protocol is to bring DeFi to marketing and create a new advertising business model that’s decentralized. They team coined the term “DeMa” to describe this new approach to advertising.

Using the Polygon network and ConsenSys products including MetaMask, Codefi Orchestrate, Diligence, and Infura, the DEP will automatically track, attribute, and reward content triggered engagements from click-through to purchase.       

The dapp will be deployed on Polygon to optimize transaction speed and cost. Infrura and Codefi Orchestrate will be leveraged for interacting with and automating smart contact calls, governance functions, and Incent treasury management. ConsenSys Diligence Fuzzing as a Service tool will be used to detect smart contracts vulnerabilities before deployment.         

When a marketing trigger like a MetaMask connection or purchase, is detected the DEP protocol distributes units of commercial sponsors’ staked budget to all of the stakeholders contributing: sponsors, content creators, content consumers, publishers, liquidity providers (including the Protocol Treasury), and the DEP DAO governance staking community.                                 

DEP will be enabled by an ERC20 utility token, ADEPT and, post Protocol launch will be DAO managed. ADEPT will replace Incent’s current (Waves Standard) INCNT token and be deployed to supplement reward payments, finance community growth and, through staking, secure yield and DAO voting rights. All existing INCNT holders will be able to convert their INCNT to ADEPT prior to listing.                    

Upon protocol launch the DEP will be compatible with all streaming and video publishing platforms and require no change in behavior from content creators or consumers. Thereafter a DEP DAO will be stood up to assume the community governance function and further incentivise community growth through partnerships, reward setting and third party development of DEP integrations, across the panoply of digital media environments, through development grants and yield sharing.

The future of DEP and decentralized advertising 

The future of DEP and DeMa are to make it possible for anyone, anywhere, to monetize any digital content, regardless of media type or distribution platform. The protocol will soon be migrating to mainnet and the DEP team have outlined their roadmap here, where you can also read the DEP whitepaper for a more technical deep dive into the protocol.