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ICO Alert Quick Facts
- Blockchain auction solution for online advertisement
- 1 ETH = 12,000 ATTN token
- February 15, 2018 — April 15, 2018
- 382,500,000 total available / 450,000,000 total supply
- Functional alpha demo is live
What is Attention Network?
Our tagline is “advertising is broken, the blockchain can fix it” and we really mean that. One of the biggest problems in advertising today is a lack of transparency, leading to an enormous amount of wasted ad spend (projected to total more than $50 billion in 2018). Attention Network’s new cryptographically verifiable auction system, along with our proof of mechanism and proof of delivery techniques, enables honesty and transparency between advertisers and publishers. Our vision is that through a fair and transparent blockchain-based solution to the problems advertisers are currently facing, we can drastically improve the advertising ecosystem as a whole. To improve the ecosystem as a whole (not just for the advertisers/publishers), we have created an advanced staking-based policy system, enforced by smart contracts. The policy system will give publishers, advertisers, and users (including normal people who hate ads) the ability to moderate ads according to the rules of the selected community, and be rewarded for their efforts. Advertisers and publishers will create ads and content, which will require them to “stake” ATTN, saying they are compliant with these democratically-defined rules, if the ads or content are deemed to be inappropriate by the community of that network, the “stake” is distributed between users who helped enforce the policy. This system allows flexibility with respect to policy (many subcommunities can emerge, with different rulesets), cost-effective delivery due to the decentralized system ad server and trust in the network, due to mathematical and cryptographic proofs.
— Giuseppe A. Burtini, CEO
Q&A with Giuseppe A. Burtini, CEO
ICO Alert: How does the Attention Network token (ATTN) function within the platform and why is it needed?
Burtini: ATTN is the only way to purchase ad space and to participate in the staking system. Advertisers and publishers are required to put up stake to participate (supporting the “quality” of their advertisements subject to the rules of their subnetwork). The token provides access to the system and allows us to ensure the necessary game theoretic properties to make the staking model work.
ICO Alert: How does your company separate itself from other blockchain based advertising projects?
Burtini: The most significant way is through our focus on adoption. Most of the other projects have made an effort to revolutionize the space, with little consideration for what the $300 billion advertising industry already expects. Our goal is to integrate the existing industry into our network and we have a number of plans in place to make that happen: from partnership formation to software integrations with existing auction systems, we become a sort of aggregator or clearing house for ads on day one. We expect this focus on building something that works for both mainstream advertisers and the cryptoenthusaist space to bring considerable attention into the space. Particularly as we can demonstrate reduced costs (in the form of lower fees), more flexibility (in the form of our ad policy subnetworks and decentralized nature) and higher ROI (through the integration of all these other auction systems, producing a more efficient auction) for both parties. With our appropriate connections to the industry and our plans for marketing and incentivization, the path to getting real, large-scale publishers and advertisers in to the system is clear.
ICO Alert: How does Attention Network plan on achieving a network effect for the platform? Is the goal focused on more users first, more marketing professionals first, or both simultaneously?
Burtini: To stimulate our network and create demand on both the publisher and advertiser side we will be integrating a select set of existing RTB (real-time bidding) systems, allowing us to have a huge inventory available on day 1. We expect to have access to more than 1,000,000,000 (one billion) impressions per day immediately. We also have secured commitments with a select set of advertisers and publishers that will be available on that platform (directly) at launch time. As we grow and expand our relationships we will onboard more publishers and advertisers to work with us directly.
ICO Alert: Is there any concern with the lack of scalability that the Ethereum network has? If the project encounters transaction speed issues, would the team be open to moving to another blockchain?
Burtini: If business and technical realities required it, we are technically capable of cloning all the balances of ATTN to a separate blockchain. This ability to transparently migrate blockchains, while maintaining the same balances for all users, is an advantage of using our own token. That said, we’ve been working hard to ensure that Ethereum will work for us. We’ve done extensive experimentation to show that with minimal off-chain aggregation and a small investment on our part into the IPFS network, we can continue to benefit from the strong smart contract infrastructure provided within the Ethereum ecosystem and achieve an appropriate level of performance. Further, looking outward, I just want to say that we believe strongly in the Ethereum Foundations plans to improve scale: sharding, layer-2 and Plasma, Raiden, there are many projects ongoing to ensure Ethereum can continue to be an appropriate network for everyone.
ICO Alert: How does Attention Network ensure that the platform is easy to use by those that are not technically savvy?
Burtini: Since our team is comprised of experienced advertisers and ad tech experts, the goal is to provide a simple and familiar interface that will hide away the complexities of the blockchain. The Ethereum ecosystem has come a long way in ease of use through tools like MetaMask and MEW, and will continue to evolve. We are hoping to leverage the existing ecosystem of great tooling for ERC20 tokens and combine it with a beautiful and familiar UI to create a seamless experience that people who are both experienced and inexperienced with blockchain can use. It is important to note that the alternatives available even outside the blockchain environment don’t achieve this today. It is a major piece of the value of our product — direct access to an inventory of advertisers and publishers that historically have been unreachable, because the systems were too complicated, had too high minimum budgets, or required personal connections.
ICO Alert: What are some of the major companies that you think will benefit from your technology? Do you have any planned partnerships you would like to discuss?
Burtini: We have a number of partnerships with advertisers and publishers who are already planned to place advertisements on the system which we intend to announce shortly. Our major beneficiaries are existing publishers and advertisers who have been hamstrung by the existing ecosystem. This includes every media buying agency, from the one-man show to the billion dollar holding companies like Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis Group. The ecosystem is very fragmented at that level and this will be an advantage for us during onboarding — by integrating the existing inventory and resolving the accessibility problem, we will be able to demonstrate cost-effective improvements to nearly everyone in the space.
ICO Alert: How far along is the project today and when can contributors expect to use the platform? What does the roadmap look like for 2018?
Burtini: We have an alpha available on our site, this is a proof of concept and some iteration is needed to bring it up to the scale/stability we are planning to achieve. We are projecting a beta release near the end of Q2. The beta will be fully functional and allow the advertising ecosystem we describe in the whitepaper to start evolving. Our full 1.0 release is projected for the end of 2018.
ICO Alert: As a non-Attention Network question, we like to ask for unique predictions for the ICO and cryptocurrency space in the future. Where do you see both in the next 3–5 years?
Burtini: I think over the next few years, we will start seeing real practical applications of blockchain technology and and programmatic distributed ledgers. 2016 and 2017 were booms in the crypto world, but I feel like it was just the beginning; everyone dipping their toes in the world of cryptocurrency, but not really seeing the true potential. We are quickly nearing a tipping point where projects will be able to tell the story of “this is why we need the blockchain” to the masses. There’s some considerable political interest. We recently saw the Canadian government start tracking business deals on the blockchain. The immutability of this allows transparency over periods longer than the 4–5 year election cycles. That’s the first layer of the legitimization, but another layer we need to keep an eye on is how the major, politically-connected corporations adopt or resist the space. Will an incumbent leader resist blockchain change or adopt it? If they resist it, what does the regulatory regime that emerges look like and how can we ensure it is fair for the majority? These are really core, important questions. Technologically, we’re going to see all the sticking points of the existing tools rapidly wash away. Performance concerns, developer tools, reliability, security models, accessibility for non-programmers and the like all have projects in progress, either by the Ethereum Foundation, competing projects, or by smaller token-oriented projects.
ICO Information
The public (and only) sale will begin on February 15, 2018 and will end no later than April 15, 2018. The team has chosen not to do a private sale or a pre sale. There are a total of 382,500,000 Attention Network tokens (ATTN) available during the main ICO, representing 85% of the total ATTN supply. A hard cap of 39 000 ETH is set for this period.
1 ETH = 1 ATTN token
Current accepted currencies for Attention Network is only Ethereum.
Attention Network is an ERC20 token, so it’s important that contributors use ERC20 compatible wallets to send funds to the ICO smart contract, and to receive the Attention Network tokens.
Token Distribution Information
There are a total 450,000,000 ATTN tokens being created, with 382,500,000 available during main ICO.
Contributors will have their tokens distributed immediately after purchase via the smart contract, but are frozen until the sale ends. Visit the Attention Network website for more information and the contribution address.
Allocation:
- 382,500,000 ATTN Crowdsale
- 67,500,000 ATTN Reserve
Token Proceeds:
Roadmap
Team
Social Media
Facebook
Medium
Twitter
Telegram
Reddit
BitcoinTalk [ANN]
View the Attention Network website here.
View the only comprehensive list of active and upcoming Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) here.
References
1. Attention Network Website, Attention Network (2018)
https://www.attentionnetwork.io
2. Attention Network Whitepaper, Attention Network (2018)
https://www.attentionnetwork.io/whitepaper.pdf
Source: ICO Alert