Online advertising is famously opaque — and Alkimi is betting blockchain can change that.
The problem: middlemen grab huge slices of ad budgets, fraud runs rampant, and advertisers and publishers alike lose out. Alkimi CEO Ben Putley points to intermediaries taking “40 to 80%” of an ad dollar when big brands buy placements, while industry estimates put global ad fraud losses as high as $100 billion. Behind-the-scenes auctions and complex supply chains mean brands sometimes pay for impressions that never reach their target audiences. eMarketer has found that nearly a third of U.S. ad spend funnels to intermediaries.
Alkimi’s pitch: AdFi — a decentralized ad finance layer built on the Sui network — brings auditability and scale to adtech. By recording campaign data on an open, tamperproof ledger, Alkimi says advertisers and publishers can watch budgets in real time and verify every impression, click and transaction. That transparency, the company argues, lets media buyers get more media for their money and returns more revenue to publishers and creators.
How it works technically
- Alkimi runs on the Sui Stack and uses three key layers: Walrus (a decentralized data layer), Seal (data security), and Nautilus (verifiable compute).
- Walrus distributes data across a network of nodes so every byte is verifiable on-chain while avoiding the prohibitive cost and latency of storing full ad-execution logs directly on layer-1.
- Seal secures the data and Nautilus validates off-chain compute and transactions, enabling fast, auditable processing at scale.
“Instead of relying on one provider, Walrus spreads data across a distributed network of nodes—ensuring data is always available, with every byte verifiable onchain,” said Rebecca Simmonds, Managing Executive of the Walrus Foundation. Walrus reports that Alkimi’s platform now processes over 25 million impressions per day and has completed roughly 3.5 billion transactions to date. Putley notes the global ad market handles between 200 and 500 million transactions per minute — suggesting significant headroom for growth.
Real-world results and clients
Alkimi already counts major brands among its customers, including Coca‑Cola, Dell, Cathay Pacific, Meta, Sky, Bupa, Kraken, PayPal, TikTok, and American Express. The company highlights campaign outcomes like:
- Polestar connected-TV campaigns with Nielsen verification: +34% sales intent, +24% brand association, 99% viewability, 96% video completion.
- AWS video campaigns: a claimed 68% reduction in CPM and a 19% lift in video completion rate.
Engineering and integration
Alkimi’s engineers say the Walrus integration was “seamless,” praising “clear, well-organised documentation” that let the team “spend less time troubleshooting and more time building.” Putley emphasizes the combo of Sui’s decentralized layer-1 and Walrus’ data storage — plus Seal and Nautilus — as a foundation to scale AdFi without sacrificing speed, cost-efficiency, or auditability.
Privacy and regulatory tailwinds
The shift comes as cookies and device identifiers fade and consumers demand more privacy. Marketers need reliable, privacy-respecting ways to measure and monetize ad performance. Alkimi positions its approach as compatible with tightening regulations such as Europe’s Digital Services Act, which increases disclosure requirements for adtech. “Cookies are disappearing, device IDs have largely disappeared from mobile phones,” Putley said. “There needs to be a new way for people to monetize data… Walrus is a very nice solution for that.”
Bottom line
Alkimi’s blend of blockchain primitives and decentralized storage aims to strip out opacity and middlemen from the ad supply chain, returning value to publishers and giving advertisers verifiable performance data. With household brands onboard and promising campaign metrics, the startup is an early example of “AdFi” in action — though the industry-wide shift away from incumbent adtech players will hinge on scalability, cost, and how quickly the ecosystem adopts decentralized infrastructure.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
