Recently, a group of advertising experts and blockchain specialists have joined forces to create Mass Network, a project seeking to solve one of the most critical problems in online advertising, being imbalance between advertisers and regular users who unwillingly provide the former with valuable and expensive information without receiving anything in return.
The Mass Network team includes representatives for such companies as Colu, Mycelium, Evernote, BitFury, Deutsche Bank and IBM, with at least two more major bitcoin companies negotiating their participation.
ForkLog contacted one of the Mass Network’s developers, Alexei Oschepov, to find out more about the project and its ICO.
FL: How exactly do you intend to use bitcoin’s blockchain for MASS?
Alexei Oschepov: As opposed to the most cryptocurrency-related projects (where such things are usually far-fetched), Mass Network considers internal currency a cornerstone and an utmost need. Mass solves a relationship conflict problem, and, therefore, the problem of instability in online advertising.
This market is one of the world’s biggest and most complex. Real time bidding infrastructure has dozens of various kinds of players with various interests. But this colossus has feet of clay. We can already see AdBlock undermining it.
One can’t solve the AdBlock problem “the hard way” now. There’s only one straightforward capitalist approach remaining: find common ground and include users in the cycle with full rights regarding both the money and access to settings.
Infiltrating advertising market and rearranging it from the outside is unreal. So ad blockers choose the path of refusal in their business models. They just build up fences by striking individual deals, most of them in the shadows, with individual networks, and call it “acceptable inconspicuous advertising”. This is a doublespeak, of course. The Brave team decided to replace someone else’s advertising with their own, and it is beyond good and evil.
FL: So, what is your offer about then?
Alexei Oschepov: Our offer, Currency-as-a-Requirement, is a perfect solution for deals with certain consumers. It’s an approach of completely different technological nature. Deals run through the entire structure of the existing market without any attempts to change it morphologically. Certainly, there are some loads emerging on the way, as well as complications for players, like a need to visit an exchange in order to exchange money, but we believe it to be an acceptable tradeoff for principal and stable solution of the adblock problem.
FL: What currency will you use for payments?
Alexei Oschepov: We’d enjoy any reliable currency. We really don’t care. The thing is that we won’t be able to afford a centralized currency. We don’t know how much it may cost considering all insurance measures and protection, but it’s extremely expensive anyway. So, blockchain it is.
Blockchain is indeed a word from a futuristic vocabulary, like a spaceport. There are airports, there are spacecrafts, but there are no spaceports. There is no blockchain but that of bitcoin so far. Everything else is either an academic experiment in its best, or a rollercoaster for adrenaline fans. It’s not a bitcoin maximalism of some sort, just but only a common sense. When you solve a physics problem, you don’t consider values different by times within the same approach, as it corrupts the solution under conditions of total ambiguity of processes. In blockchains, we’ve got at least three orders of magnitude in difference of security levels in bitcoin and non-bitcoin.
FL: Does it mean that you’ll be using a pre-existing blockchain, and that MASS tokens will effectively be colored coins in bitcoin’s blockchain?
Alexei Oschepov: Yes. Why not? Technological primitiveness in this case is only a benefit.
Original: http://forklog.net/mass-network-and-online-advertising-transformation/