by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 21, 2017

BPC (Blockchain Programmatic Corp.) cofounder and CEO, Pavel Cherkashin, who moved to San Francisco from Russia four years ago, plans to shake up advertising with a technology that will make blockchain possible for the digital industry.

The product launches for advertisers on Dec. 1. It took BPC engineers about six months to build. “We are in the final stages of development,” Cherkashin said.

BPC was established to develop and operate the first blockchain-based programmatic advertising platform that integrates the core technology of any programmatic real-time bidding service.

Just as the introduction of programmatic shook up the advertising industry, the integration of blockchain aims to do the same.

“Google search results look more like an Encyclopedia Britannica,” he said. “We want to build the Wikipedia for the market and make it an open platform available to everyone.”

The platform is meant to make this type of technology available to smaller businesses, cross-border companies to ease currency exchange challenges, and improve the trust factor across the industry.

A few companies have been piloting the blockchain. Cherkashin declined to name them, noting they were “large digital agencies.”

With more than 12 years of industry experience and having developed 70 U.S. patents, Cherkashin is bound and determined to educate others on blockchain-based programmatic advertising.

One of the major issues with developing a blockchain that works for the advertising industry has been speed. Cherkashin said today’s blockchain technology can only record about 10,000 transactions per second.

For real-time bidding to work efficiently, it must record at least 1 million transactions per second. To solve this challenge, the company built a “multilayer” technology to increase the speed and volume it can record.

Cherkashin isn’t a stranger to advertising. In fact during his career he co-founded Actis Systems, now Moscow-based digital agency Actis Wunderman, which became part of WPP Group.

While trust has become a major issue in advertising, the new growing technology, blockchain, requires a secure registry. By introducing this type of registry to the advertising market, specifically programmatic, Cherkashin hopes BPC can achieve a level of trust even for smaller players to join and improve on the crowd-funding model.

Rather than have a few large corporation sit between advertisers and publishers that control all the data, BPC wants to open the market to advertisers, publishers and data providers where they can transparently see all the information and transactions across the network, have access to data and introduce models, technical and scientific tools for everyone to use.

Partners connected to the system place code on their website, so every action is logged automatically into the blockchain. DSP, trading desks, and advertisers also connected to the blockchain, all actions they do and campaigns they launch are recorded into the blockchain. Once information is logged it cannot be erased, he said, adding that all the participants in the network make it secure.

“The idea is to use the data as a reference if there’s any type of dispute,” he said.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

(36)