adChain Registry is one of the clearest early examples of a token-curated registry applied to a real vertical. The list being curated is a set of publisher domains meant to represent authentic, non-fraudulent ad inventory.
The primary materials make the core TCR loop explicit: applicants stake ADT, challengers match the stake, token holders vote, and the losing side’s deposit funds rewards for the winning side.
The voting layer is not a generic open poll. The blog explicitly says adChain uses Partial Lock Commit Reveal (PLCR) voting derived from Colony’s partial-lock token-weighted voting system.
The contract README makes an important detail explicit that shorter explainers can obscure: whitelisted domains keep a deposit locked in the registry, can be rechallenged later, and may need to top up if governance raises minDeposit.
Parameter governance is part of the protocol surface rather than an afterthought. The README describes changeParameter() proposals and immediate votes on proposed parameter changes, which means challenge windows, deposit requirements, and similar rules are themselves politically mutable.
The strongest analytical framing in the official prose is the three-sided incentive loop: advertisers want a high-quality list, publishers want access to advertiser demand, and token holders want the list quality to support token value.
Specific source signals worth retaining
Introducing the adChain Registry is the best source for the broader rationale: identity handshake for advertisers/publishers, registry as a premium domain source, and the claim that token holders curate publisher legitimacy rather than CPM volume.
The adChain Registry ELI5 is the cleanest source for the consumer / candidate / token-holder framing and for the simple application / challenge / vote / reward loop.
The GitHub README is the most useful source for mechanism details that matter to comparison work: rechallenges, whitelist deposit retention, isWhitelisted(), claimReward(), and reparameterization.
The whitepaper is worth retaining primarily as the canonical contemporaneous protocol statement, even though the blog posts and README are the fastest route to the mechanism’s control surfaces.
Why this entry belongs in the corpus
It gives the corpus a historical lower bound for later challengeable-registry systems such as Kleros Curate, Potlock Lists, and other list-admission layers.
It helps separate four layers that later products often blur together: candidate admission, challenger rights, voter incentives, and parameter governance.
The durable insight is that open curation is rarely just open participation; practical power sits in deposit sizing, challenge costs, voting mechanics, and governance over the registry’s own rules.