Summary: adChain Registry is worth cataloging less as an advertising product and more as one of the clearest early token-curated-registry baselines. Its primary materials make the control surface unusually legible: publisher domains apply with an ADT deposit, challengers can force a dispute by matching that stake, token holders vote through a partial-lock commit-reveal process, winners take a portion of the loser’s deposit, and parameters like minimum deposit and challenge timing are themselves governance objects. That makes adChain a useful historical comparison point for Kleros Curate, Potlock Lists, Operator Filter Registry, and other challengeable-registry systems: it separates candidate admission, challenger rights, voter incentives, and parameter governance instead of flattening them into a generic community curation story.
What it does:
Maintains an onchain registry of publisher domains meant to represent non-fraudulent ad inventory sources
Requires applicants to stake adToken (ADT) to apply for inclusion in the registry
Lets challengers contest an application by matching the applicant’s deposit, which triggers a token-holder vote
Uses token-weighted Partial Lock Commit Reveal (PLCR) voting so votes are committed and revealed in separate phases
Redistributes part of the losing side’s deposit to the winning applicant, challenger, and winning-side voters
Allows already-whitelisted domains to be rechallenged and allows registry parameters to be reparameterized through governance votes
Exposes a simple isWhitelisted()-style verification surface so downstream ad systems can check whether a domain is listed
Key claims:
The main reason to keep adChain in the active corpus is that it makes the classic token-curated-registry control plane concrete. The important layers are not just a list plus a token; they are application staking, challenge rights, hidden-ballot voting, reward redistribution, and live parameter governance.
adChain is especially useful as a lower-bound comparison for later challengeable registries because it makes the consumer / candidate / token-holder triad explicit. Advertisers consume the list, publishers want admission, and token holders are paid to curate quality because registry quality is supposed to drive token value.
The registry’s whitelist deposits are not just a spam-prevention fee. In the contract docs they persist after admission and interact with rechallenges and parameter changes, which means governance over minDeposit can indirectly change who can remain listed.
Reparameterization is one of the most important retained insights. adChain did not freeze registry rules at launch; it let token holders vote on changing parameters like deposit requirements or timing windows. That makes it a better comparison point for later registries than a static whitelist would be.
The PLCR voting link matters historically because adChain explicitly imported its commit-reveal voting design from Colony’s partial-lock voting work. That helps connect early registry curation to broader Ethereum-era experiments in token-based governance mechanics.
The durable governance insight is that supposedly open curation still centralizes around parameter setters, UI operators, challenger sophistication, and the social layer that decides what counts as a valid challenge. The open list frame can hide those practical chokepoints.
Whitepaper: See ../whitepapers/adchain-registry-whitepaper.pdf and ../whitepapers/adchain-registry-primary-sources-2026-05-12.md.