There’s no question there is a lot of funny business going on in the token market today.

Real funny business.

In the last few months, Facebook has become the epicenter of the worst of the crypto-marketplace: deceptive promises of massive returns, wild speculation, fake products, unrealistic business models, flat out scams.

It is unfortunate, but this behavior has led Facebook to announce they are banning cryptocurrencies and token sales from their advertising platform, effective immediately. They further indicate that the ban is “intentionally broad.” Indeed, it is.

While clearing out a lot of the scams and cruft, this ban hurts legitimate businesses, but in Facebook’s current model, it is clear they don’t have much of a choice.

Facebook is forced to make a single ecosystem-wide policy judgment and enforce it upon everyone. They have to enforce it on their entire publisher network as well, even if some of the sites in the network have users who love seeing cryptocurrency ads.

There are some huge publishers on Facebook’s external publisher network, and many are from the more mainstream business ecosystem — who are actively expressing anti-cryptocurrency sentiment: they don’t want this stuff associated with their brands and they don’t want to be associated with promoting it.

Facebook has to ban crypto-related advertisers, because on average, these ads are perceived to be consuming that publisher-side “brand equity” that we talk about in our whitepaper. Seeing ads like this on the platform leads people to distrust Facebook and the rest of the network. It hurts the value of their platform.

Probably how Mark Zuckerberg feels about cryptocurrencies right now.

The distrust reduces the goodwill their users allocate to Facebook — it reduces things like time-on-site, positive interactions and other metrics of Facebook uses to gauge the health of their ecosystem. It hurts other advertisers by association and by the reduction in trust users feel in the ad platform.

It is one-size-fits-all and they don’t have the internal expertise to devise useful rules that identify scams from legitimate products — or, perhaps, they don’t feel any of the cryptocurrency space is legitimate. It is only a matter of time before the remaining options on the market follow suit and prevent the crypto ecosystem from accessing traditional ad channels.

This doesn’t have to be the way. This problem is merely an artifact of the status quo.

Attention Network provides a new model: one where advertisers and publishers have a “meeting of the minds” to define their policy, and that agreement is enforced via a strong, cryptographically-guaranteed staking model. The shared, democratically-emergent policy rules, which we call “subnetworks,” allow a marketplace to rapidly respond to changing ecosystems — identifying what is acceptable in each context and revising that definition as fast as possible.

Best of all, violations of policy result in monetary incentives for those effected. While ideally, policy violations do not happen: the reality that has been proven time and time again by the advertising giants that policy violations do happen, brands get upset being placed next to hate videos, people see unwanted penis enlargement ads, it will continue to happen.

If the brightest minds in the world at Facebook and Google can not solve ad policy with purely machines and AI, then an alternative approach must be taken. No one can say if an ad fits within a set of given rules better than the human who created the ad, but the monetary incentive in traditional advertising today suggests that ad policy should be broken if the monetary incentive is outweighs the consequences.

Under our new model, the consequences of breaking the the rules defined by a subnetwork will naturally outweigh the benefit of breaking the rules. An advertiser will “stake” to establish trust in their ad being compliant within the rules defined by the subnetwork. In the event the rules are broken, the stake is forfeited and distributed across the effected parties, all while being enforced by a transparent, democratic smart contract.

Rather than the one-size-fits-all policy rules the advertising giants have been forced to apply, we believe our flexible policy establishment and trustable enforcement innovations can change the way regular people view advertising — making enforcement more reliable and advertising more appropriate for it’s context — while making it more accessible and flexible for all parties.