Blockchain innovators battle fake news with tokens and content scoring

Global media agency Mindshare has partnered with Singpore's high speed blockchain Zilliqa to address the problem of fake news.

Mindshare is global media agency with over 7,000 employees and $31bn in annual billings; Zilliqa offers a high speed blockchain platform developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore.

The partnership will involve testing whether Zilliqa's blockchain protocol can be used to address pervasive industry challenges including contextual advertising in relation to fake news; develop strategic initiatives around data privacy and develop an industry-wide tokenisation program which can be used for publisher and content scoring.

In an official release, Gowthaman Ragothaman, Global Chief Strategy Officer at Mindshare's integrated performance unit, FAST, said: "Blockchain technology is going to influence the media and entertainment industry at a much more rapid pace than we ever thought possible.

"There is a popular saying that in technology we often overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten years. Mindshare is absolutely delighted to partner with Zilliqa to test this technology and its possible future application in the media and entertainment industry.

"We have a set of hypothesis that we want to prove either right or wrong and to build some tools that will eventually benefit the business of advertising and technology, especially when it comes together to influence consumer behaviour."

Xinshu Dong, CEO of Zilliqa, said: "We are incredibly excited to be working with Mindshare on this ground-breaking industry initiative and applying the Zilliqa blockchain protocol to address pervasive industry issues around contextual advertising and validated content.

"Zilliqa's underlying infrastructure has already been applied in applications in the financial services sector, and it is a great move for us to explore the power of a high-throughput distributed ledger in the advertising industry, and in particular with Mindshare, which is a pinnacle for innovation and agility in the industry.

"We are confident that with the unique technology provided by Zilliqa, and the industry-leading expertise from Mindshare, this partnership will deliver innovative and timely solutions to some of the most challenging issues plaguing the digital advertising industry."

Zilliqa has already built a working platform and has recently announced that their internal testnet has reached a peak throughput of 2,488 transactions per second (TX/s). For perspective, if Zilliqa were fully operational on the same number of computer nodes as Ethereum (~22,000) their transaction rate would be over 15,000 TX/s, nearly double the average of VISA, the largest electronic payment network in the world.

The partnership will be piloted out of Singapore, where Mindshare's Asia Pacific FAST Hub is based.