I stumbled on this Walrus-Alkimi partnership a few weeks ago and honestly just scrolled past it. Figured it was another adtech company slapping blockchain on their pitch deck. But Alkimi kept popping up in places that made me think they might be onto something real, so I finally went down the rabbit hole.
And yeah, the whole thing is kind of nuts.
Alkimi isn't trying to tweak digital advertising. They're trying to tear it down and rebuild it from the ground up. And they're using Walrus to make ad performance data transparent and verifiable in ways that just haven't existed before.
Here's the thing—digital advertising is a mess right now. Most people have no idea how bad it actually is. Advertisers throw money at impressions and clicks. Publishers run ads and get paid for traffic. A bunch of middlemen take fat cuts to connect the two. And nobody trusts the numbers. Everyone assumes there's fraud somewhere in the chain, but there's no real way to prove what actually happened.
Ad fraud is huge. Bots faking user activity, phantom clicks, made-up impressions, reports that don't line up with reality. The industry loses billions every year to this stuff. Everybody knows it's going on, but nobody's figured out how to really stop it.
Alkimi's play is putting verified ad data on Walrus so it's transparent and checkable. When an ad gets shown, when someone clicks it, when there's a conversion—that all gets stored as permanent blobs on Walrus. Advertisers can actually verify they got what they paid for. Publishers can prove they delivered what they promised.
But here's where it gets weird. They're not just storing data for the sake of transparency. They're treating verified ad data like a financial asset. They call it AdFi, which sounds like marketing BS but actually describes something I haven't seen before.
Think about traditional finance for a second. You've got all these instruments backed by real assets. Mortgage-backed securities, commodity futures, derivatives of every flavor. The underlying asset is what gives the financial product value. But advertising data has never worked as an asset because you couldn't trust whether it was real.
If ad performance data is verifiable and stored where it can't be changed, you can suddenly start building financial products around it. Maybe you tokenize actual ad performance and trade it. Maybe you set up prediction markets on campaign outcomes. Maybe you create new kinds of programmatic advertising where everything's transparent by default.
I'm still figuring out what the full picture looks like here, but the basic idea clicks. Make the data trustworthy first, then layer financial stuff on top of trustworthy data.
Walrus makes sense for this because advertising spits out insane amounts of data all the time. Every impression, every click, every conversion—it's all events that need recording. You need storage that can keep up with high volume, stay online, and keep the data intact long-term.
Sure, regular cloud storage could technically handle this. But then you're back to trusting AWS or Google or whoever. The whole point is making the data verifiably independent. Advertisers shouldn't have to trust publishers. Publishers shouldn't have to trust ad networks. The data should just exist on its own, provably.
This ties into something bigger happening with AI and data markets. AI models need training data. Advertisers are sitting on mountains of user behavior data. But there's no real market to buy and sell this stuff because nobody trusts where it came from or whether it's any good.
If you store advertising data on Walrus with cryptographic proof it's legit, suddenly AI companies might actually pay for it. Not just for ad targeting, but for training models on how real people actually behave online.
Baselight, another project working with Walrus, is building exactly this—a data marketplace. They're trying to make data distribution instant and permissionless. Traditional platforms like Snowflake have approval processes that drag on for days. Baselight wants to cut that down to minutes by using decentralized storage.
The pattern is the same: cut out the gatekeepers, make the data independently verifiable. Whether it's ad data, training datasets, or other structured info, being able to prove authenticity without trusting some central authority opens up new markets.
I keep coming back to how much of the economy runs on data nobody really believes. Financial reports that might be cooked. User metrics that could be inflated. Performance numbers from black boxes nobody can see inside. We've just accepted that data is sketchy and priced in the risk everywhere.
What changes when you can actually verify data cryptographically? When storage infrastructure makes data genuinely independent from whoever created it? The incentives shift in pretty fundamental ways.
Alkimi's still early. They're not moving the needle on digital ad spend yet. But what they're building is actually different from how advertising works now. Instead of murky middlemen taking massive cuts, you get transparent infrastructure where everyone can check what happened.
Whether this actually takes a bite out of a massive, entrenched industry? Who knows. The big players aren't going to roll over, and there are serious network effects protecting the status quo. But the technical setup makes way more sense than most blockchain advertising projects I've seen.
The Walrus piece isn't just "we need storage somewhere." It's enabling a specific architecture where data authenticity is the foundation for financial products. That feels like actual product-market fit instead of a solution hunting for a problem.
I'm watching this one over the next year. If Alkimi can get real ad volume running through their system and prove the economics actually work, it might validate this whole idea about verifiable data creating new market structures.
Right now it's one of the better examples of someone using decentralized storage to solve a real problem in a way that centralized options genuinely can't.
