A trial ad campaign using the Zilliqa blockchain has resulted in a 28% boost in efficiency for beverage giant PepsiCo.

In a press release on May 6, media agency network Mindshare explained how the test—which ran in Asia Pacific in March 2019—was part of Project Proton, which is designed to explore how Zilliqa can address some of the challenges the advertising industry may face.

The test automated the programmatic advertising process using smart contracts, built on a private Zilliqa blockchain. The contracts reconcile impressions from different data sources, and facilitates payments using an internal token—Native Alliance Token (NAT)—in almost real-time. The company claims this results in significant increases in efficiency, as well as providing complete transparency for the brand owners.

The Project primarily focuses on combating ad fraud; creating a new business model in which advertisers need only pay for valid impressions. Using a permissioned chain, the entire process can be transparent to the brand and publishers, but encrypted to anyone else in the supply chain.

Co-founder of Zilliqa Research, Max Kantelia, revealed how the blockchain startup are “proud to work with Mindshare and other leaders and influencers within the global media landscape.” He continued:

“This alliance illustrates the power of smart contracts and serves as a reminder that blockchain can drive business benefits to industries beyond just finance. As Project Proton unfolds, we eagerly await to assess its impact and how we could – along with Mindshare’s expertise and insights – develop it on our scalable and secure platform.”

The team at PepsiCo plan on running a number of other campaigns under different conditions, to further test the efficacy of Project Proton.

Mindshare is a global media and marketing company with over 7,000 employees across 116 countries, and global revenue of over $30 billion. Their clients include PepsiCo, GSK, Unilever, Dyson, Nestle, and American Express.

The Zilliqa Blockchain

Zilliqa is a smart contract platform which launched its mainnet in January 2019. The network prides itself on its scalability and security—allegedly reaching almost 3,000 transactions per second in its testnet.

Zilliqa uses an implementation of ‘sharding‘, a process used in traditional databases that spreads the server load and increases efficiency. In blockchain, sharding results in a model that increases capacity as the number of nodes increases.

The platform uses a hybrid Proof-of-Work and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm. This ensures that mining on Zilliqa is more energy efficient, while retaining security.

At the time of writing, ZIL, the native token for the Zilliqa platform, is trading at approximately $0.016.