Adgora — a crypto-native advertising network

01Project overview

Adgora is a crypto-native public advertising network that connects advertisers and site owners directly, settling everything in cryptocurrency. It is not yet another banner exchange or a closed affiliate program: Adgora is open to both sides of the market and is built around a simple idea — transparent advertising without unnecessary middlemen, where money moves directly, the publisher keeps a larger share of the revenue, and the advertiser gets clear formats and predictable targeting.

In the classic media chain, a string of intermediaries sits between the advertiser's budget and the publisher's wallet: networks, exchanges, resellers, aggregators. Each takes its cut, and the site owner ends up with noticeably less than the advertiser paid. Adgora deliberately compresses that chain: the network matches supply and demand on a single platform, and settlements run in cryptocurrency, bypassing the banking perimeter along with its delays, fees and geographic restrictions.

We designed and built the product as a coherent system: ad serving, click tracking, dashboards for both sides of the market, a programmatic interface and an administrative area with moderation. Under the hood is a refactored ad-serving engine built on a mature legacy core, to which we added crypto settlements, anti-fraud and modern analytics. Below we break down what problem Adgora solves, how the network is built internally, and which engineering decisions made ad serving and settlements transparent and resistant to fraud.

It is worth stating the context up front: Adgora was conceived not as a one-off banner widget but as a standalone advertising platform — with two user roles, its own economics, campaign formats and a public API. You connect once and can either buy traffic for your goals or monetize your own audience, all within a single transparent settlement system.

02Context and the problem

Launching banner serving is technically easy — building an honest market that both sides trust is hard. As we broke the task down, a set of systemic pain points surfaced, all typical of classic media advertising:

• Opaque supply chain. The advertiser cannot see where their ads actually run, and the publisher has no idea how much the intermediaries skimmed on the way to their payout.
• A heavy middleman cut. Every link takes its margin, so the site owner ends up with a smaller part of the money the advertiser paid.
• Settlement friction. Payouts are tied to banks and payment systems: minimum thresholds, long delays, currency conversions, geographic limits and blocks.
• Invalid traffic. Bots, click fraud and impression farms drain advertiser budgets and erode trust in the network as a whole.
• Weak analytics. Statistics often boil down to bare impression and click counts, with no breakdown by site, format or traffic quality.

The task was framed like this: build an advertising network that removes the middlemen and the opacity, settles directly in cryptocurrency, and at the same time protects the advertiser from fraud and the publisher from a shrunken revenue share. The advertiser should be able to launch a campaign in an evening and understand what they are paying for; the publisher should connect a site and see honest statistics and payouts.

A separate layer of the task is trust in the impressions themselves. In an ad network money moves on the basis of events — impressions and clicks — which means those events must be trustworthy. Any hole in the accounting translates directly into wasted budgets and a damaged reputation, so we treated event recording with the same seriousness that payment systems apply to transaction accounting.

03Project goals

From the task grew a set of concrete product and engineering goals that we kept in mind at every stage:

• Transparency by default. Both sides see what is happening: the advertiser sees where and how the campaign runs, the publisher sees how much they earned and for what.
• Direct settlement in crypto. Topping up budgets and paying out publishers in cryptocurrency, without the banking perimeter, with clear rules and minimal friction.
• A larger share for the publisher. The network's economics are arranged so that the bulk of revenue goes to the site owner rather than settling with intermediaries.
• Clear campaign formats. Three basic payment models — per click, per impressions and per action — cover most advertiser scenarios.
• Fraud protection. Invalid-traffic filtering is built into the pipeline rather than bolted on the side, so budgets do not leak into bots.
• Self-service dashboards. Advertiser and publisher manage everything themselves — campaigns, sites, budgets and payouts — without contacting support at every step.
• A public API. Site integration and automation for larger partners through a clear programmatic interface.

These goals sometimes pull in different directions: transparency competes with simplicity, fraud protection with ad-serving speed, a generous publisher share with the network's economic sustainability. A large part of the project work was precisely about finding the balance between them rather than sacrificing one goal for another.

04What we built

Adgora assembles the advertising cycle into a few clear building blocks that cover the whole path from launching a campaign to paying out the publisher:

On top of this core sit a landing page with clear positioning, an administrative area with moderation of ads and sites, analytics by campaign and by site, and a public API for integrations. All of it is deployed as a single product on dedicated infrastructure split across specialized subdomains.

05Solution architecture and the public API

Adgora is split across several specialized subdomains — this physically separates roles and loads from one another and makes access and policies easier to constrain. Each subdomain is responsible for its own part of the advertising cycle:

• ad.adgora.net — ad serving: a high-load contour that, in response to a site request, selects and returns a suitable ad unit.
• go.adgora.net — redirect click tracking: every click passes through this node, gets recorded and is forwarded to the advertiser's landing page.
• my.adgora.net — advertiser and publisher dashboards: campaigns, sites, budgets, statistics and payouts.
• api.adgora.net — the public programmatic interface for integrations and partner-side automation.
• admin.adgora.net — the administrative panel: moderation of ads and sites, dispute resolution, network management.

This split is not cosmetic. The ad-serving and click-tracking contour is the most loaded and latency-sensitive, so it is carved out separately from the heavy dashboards and analytics. The moderation admin is isolated from the public contour, and the API gets its own access policies and rate limits. Under the hood is a server stack on PHP, deployed behind Cloudflare, which closes the perimeter, handles TLS and filters out part of the parasitic traffic right at the approaches.

Logically the system consists of several blocks: ad serving and selection, event tracking (impressions and clicks), anti-fraud (traffic validation), accounting and settlement (budgets, revenue, payouts), moderation and analytics. Each block owns its slice of the cycle and talks to the others across clear boundaries — which simplifies both scaling and maintenance.

Public API

Adgora was conceived as an open public network, not a closed platform, so the public programmatic interface on api.adgora.net is an organic part of it. The API is needed where manual management through the dashboard is no longer enough: for site integration, automating campaign management and pulling statistics on the side of larger partners.

Through the API a publisher can embed ad serving into their own system more deeply than through a simple ad unit, and an advertiser can automate campaign management if they run many campaigns and want to manage them programmatically. This turns Adgora from a "site with a dashboard" into a platform you can lean on when building your own products and integrations.

The API contour is carved out onto a separate subdomain with its own access policies and limits — this is both cleaner from a security standpoint and lets the programmatic interface evolve independently without touching the public serving contour and the dashboards. A partner works with clear methods, while the network's internal details stay behind the interface facade.

06Campaign formats: CPC, CPM, CPA

The advertiser pays for a result, not for an abstract "presence in the network," so at the heart of Adgora lie three clear payment models that cover most scenarios:

CPC — cost per click

The advertiser pays only when a user clicks the ad and lands on the target page. This is the model for those who need traffic and visits: the budget is spent on actual interested users, not on impressions. This is exactly where click tracking and anti-fraud are critical — every paid click must be genuine.

CPM — cost per mille

The advertiser pays per thousand ad impressions regardless of clicks. This is the model for reach and brand tasks, where it matters that as many people as possible see the audience message. Here, trustworthy impression accounting and protection against bot farms inflating the counters come to the fore.

CPA — cost per action

The advertiser pays for a target action — a sign-up, a lead, a purchase. This is the most result-oriented model: the advertiser effectively pays for the achieved outcome rather than for intermediate metrics. It requires a tighter link with the site and careful accounting of the actions performed.

Having all three formats in a single network lets the advertiser pick the model for a specific goal — from pure reach to performance — without moving to different platforms. The publisher, in turn, gains access to demand from different payment models on one and the same site.

07The advertiser side

For the advertiser, Adgora is a traffic-buying tool with clear economics. In their dashboard they walk through the whole path on their own, without contacting managers at every step.

Creating a campaign

The advertiser sets up a campaign, picks a payment format (CPC, CPM or CPA), uploads creatives and sets a bid. A campaign is a container that holds targeting settings, the budget and the ads themselves; it is easy to manage as a single unit — pause it, adjust the bid, add creatives.

Targeting

Ads are shown not to everyone indiscriminately but to the audience and on the sites that match the campaign's goals. Targeting lets you narrow the reach to a relevant segment so the budget is spent meaningfully rather than scattered across irrelevant impressions. The more precise the setup, the higher the return on every unit of budget invested.

Budget management

The campaign budget is topped up in cryptocurrency and spent as the campaign runs. The advertiser sees how funds are spent and controls the burn through bids and limits. Because settlements run in crypto, top-ups do not hit banking thresholds and delays — money appears in the campaign quickly.

The key value for the advertiser is transparency and control. They see where the budget goes, on which sites the campaign runs and what result it brings, while fraud protection guarantees that money is spent on real traffic rather than bots.

08The publisher side

For the publisher, Adgora is a way to monetize traffic honestly and with a large revenue share. The site owner connects, receives ad units and earns on impressions and clicks on advertisers' ads.

Connecting a site

The publisher adds a site in the dashboard and gets an ad unit — a snippet that is embedded on the page. Once installed, the unit starts requesting ads from the serving engine and showing them to visitors. No complex integration: connecting a site takes minutes, not days.

Monetizing traffic

Every impression and click on an ad on the publisher's site generates revenue. The serving engine selects relevant ads, and tracking reliably records the events on which the earnings are calculated. The higher the quality of a site's traffic, the more attractive it is to advertisers and the higher its revenue.

Revenue share and payouts

The network's economics favor the publisher: the bulk of the revenue goes to the site owner rather than settling with intermediaries. Payouts run in cryptocurrency — without long banking cycles and currency restrictions, which matters especially for publishers from different countries.

09Economics and the publisher's share

The heart of any advertising network is its economics: how the advertiser's money turns into publisher revenue and what stays with the network itself. Adgora was built around the principle that the bulk of the revenue should go to the publisher — the owner of the audience for whose sake advertising exists in the first place.

In the classic chain, several links sit between the advertiser's budget and the publisher's wallet, and each takes its percentage. Adgora compresses that chain to a minimum: the network itself matches supply and demand, so essentially two parties take part in the revenue split — the publisher, who gets the larger part, and the network, which retains the smaller share to maintain and develop the infrastructure.

When a billable event happens on a publisher's site — a click, an impression or an action, depending on the campaign format — the amount the advertiser paid for it is distributed according to rules that are clear in advance. The publisher sees their revenue in the dashboard, and that figure is not eroded by invisible fees along the way. The transparency of the split is as much a part of the product as ad serving itself.

Crypto settlements reinforce this model: they remove banking friction and allow revenue to be paid out directly, without payment-system intermediaries that would also take their cut and impose their restrictions. As a result, the path from the advertiser's budget to the publisher's payout becomes shorter and more transparent than in traditional media buying.

10Anti-fraud and traffic quality

In an ad network money moves on the basis of events — impressions and clicks — so the trustworthiness of those events is critical. If invalid traffic seeps into the accounting, everyone suffers: the advertiser pays for bots, honest publishers lose their share of demand, and trust in the network as a whole is undermined. That is why invalid-traffic filtering is built into the pipeline itself, not bolted on after the fact.

The job of anti-fraud is to separate genuine actions of real users from artificially generated ones: bot impressions, fraudulent clicks, farms and automated visits. The tracking contour is arranged so that suspicious events can be filtered out before they turn into a deduction from the advertiser's budget or a credit to the publisher. This protects both sides of the market at once.

Anti-fraud is not a one-off check but the network's constant hygiene. The cleaner the traffic, the higher the advertisers' trust and the more attractive a site becomes for placement. So fighting fraud is not a side feature but one of the conditions on which a transparent ad network rests at all: the advertiser must be sure they pay for real people, and the publisher must know that honest traffic is valued above fraudulent traffic.

Separately, note that part of the parasitic load is cut off at the approaches — at the Cloudflare level, which closes the perimeter. This unburdens the serving and tracking contour from obvious junk so it can focus on finer filtering at the level of the network's own logic.

11Click and impression tracking

Event accounting is the bookkeeping of an ad network, and it deserves the same rigor that payment systems apply to transaction accounting. In Adgora two contours handle this: ad serving on ad.adgora.net records impressions, and redirect tracking on go.adgora.net records clicks.

Impression accounting

When a site requests an ad, the serving engine selects a suitable creative and records the fact of the impression. The CPM model and the reach statistics are built on impressions. Trustworthiness here is ensured by the link with anti-fraud — counters inflated by bots must not make it into billable statistics.

Redirect click tracking

A click on an ad does not go straight to the advertiser's site but through the go.adgora.net node. That intermediate hop is precisely the point of trustworthy accounting: the network records the click, validates it, and only then forwards the user to the target page. For the user it is imperceptible — a fraction of a second on the redirect — but for the network it is the only reliable way to tie a click to a campaign, a site and a budget.

The whole economy rests on trustworthy tracking: the deduction from the advertiser's budget and the credit to the publisher are tied to validated events, not to home-grown counters that cannot be trusted. It is the same logic as in payment systems: the only source of truth is a validated event, not a client-side "ping."

12Statistics and analytics

The network's transparency rests not on declarations but on data that both sides of the market can see. So analytics in Adgora is not a nice extra but part of the product's core. The advertiser and the publisher must be able to understand at any moment what is happening with their campaigns and sites.

The advertiser sees statistics broken down by campaign: how many impressions and clicks there were, how the budget is spent, on which sites the ads run and what result they bring. This lets them react promptly — adjust bids, reallocate the budget, switch off ineffective directions. Without such a breakdown, advertising turns into spending blind.

The publisher, in turn, sees analytics for their sites: traffic volume, impressions and clicks, and — most importantly — the revenue earned. Transparent statistics are exactly what builds trust: the site owner sees with their own eyes how traffic turns into money and does not depend on unverifiable network reports.

Analytics rely on the same trustworthy event tracking as the settlements — so the figures in the dashboards and the payout amounts agree with one another. This is a matter of principle: when analytics and billing are built on different sources, discrepancies and disputes inevitably appear between them. In Adgora the source is one, and both sides look at a consistent picture.

13Moderation of ads and sites

A public network open to connection from both sides cannot work without moderation. Otherwise fraudulent creatives, prohibited content and sites whose traffic undermines advertiser trust inevitably creep in. That is why the admin area (admin.adgora.net) has a moderation contour for ads and sites.

Ad moderation filters out what should not be shown to the audience: misleading creatives, prohibited topics, outright scams. This protects publishers — dubious ads will not appear on their sites — and supports the network's reputation as a place that can be trusted. In a crypto-native environment, where scams are traditionally abundant, such a filter is especially important.

Site moderation works from the other side of the market: the network watches the traffic quality of connected sites so that advertisers do not pay for placement where traffic is artificial or irrelevant. Combined with anti-fraud, this forms a double barrier — at the level of individual events and at the level of whole sites.

The admin area gives the network operator tools for day-to-day work: reviewing and approving ads and sites, resolving disputes, managing statuses. In essence it is a "console" over the public contour — the place where live moderation upholds the transparency and cleanliness the network promises both sides.

14Technology stack, infrastructure and the legacy core

For Adgora we assembled a separate environment split across subdomains — each contour with its own access, caching and security policies. This is both cleaner from a load standpoint and simpler to maintain.

• Backend — a server stack on PHP: ad serving and selection, event tracking, accounting of budgets and revenue, settlement and payout logic.
• Serving engine — a refactored legacy ad-serving core, augmented with crypto settlements and anti-fraud.
• Crypto layer — settlements in TON and USDT: topping up advertiser budgets and paying out publishers directly, bypassing the banking perimeter.
• Infrastructure — split across the ad / go / my / api / admin subdomains, behind Cloudflare (DNS, TLS, perimeter protection and filtering of part of the parasitic traffic).
• Security — isolation of the admin and API from the public contour, separate access policies, built-in invalid-traffic filtering.

Legacy core and refactoring

Adgora is built not from scratch but on a refactored legacy ad-serving engine. This is a deliberate engineering decision: a mature ad-serving core is years of finely tuned ad-selection logic, event accounting and behavior under load. Rewriting that from scratch would mean stepping on the same rakes that a proven engine has already worked around.

Our work was not about throwing away the legacy but about putting it in order and growing new things on top. We refactored the base engine: untangled its structure, brought it up to date, separated out the obsolete parts and prepared a foundation for the new contours. On top of the updated core we added what the original engine did not and could not have — crypto settlements, modern anti-fraud, updated dashboards for both sides and analytics.

This approach — take a reliable foundation and modernize it carefully — saves months of development and lowers risk. Instead of re-proving the basic mechanics of ad serving from scratch, we focused on what sets Adgora apart from classic networks: transparency, crypto economics and fraud protection. It is our usual balance between "don't reinvent the wheel" and "don't drag technical debt along with you."

15Design and UX

Adgora deals with money on both sides of the market, so we made the interfaces calm and technical, without visual noise. The landing page explains the value in a few seconds: what it is, who it is for, how it differs from classic networks (transparency, crypto directly, a larger publisher share) and how to start — separate, clear entry points for the advertiser and for the publisher.

The two roles' dashboards solve different tasks, and we did not try to cram them into one universal interface. The advertiser cares about campaigns, creatives, targeting and budget burn; the publisher about sites, ad units, traffic and revenue. Each dashboard speaks to the user in the language of their tasks, not in the language of the network's internal workings.

Special attention went to the screens that show figures. In an ad network, statistics are the product: it is by them that the advertiser decides whether to keep spending and the publisher decides whether to trust the network. So we aimed to present analytics clearly and unambiguously, so that the key indicators read at a glance rather than drowning in overloaded tables.

16How we worked

We ran the project in sequential stages with a demonstrable result at each step — so the client saw movement and could correct course without waiting for the finale:

• Research. We unpacked the ad-network model, the pain points of classic media buying, the payment formats (CPC, CPM, CPA), the advertiser and publisher roles and the crypto economics of settlements.
• Legacy-engine audit. We studied the base ad-serving core (adbn), assessed what to take as a foundation and what to rework, and planned the refactoring.
• Architecture. We designed the split across the ad / go / my / api / admin subdomains and the contours of serving, tracking, anti-fraud, accounting and moderation.
• Core development. We refactored the engine, built impression and click tracking, anti-fraud, accounting of budgets and revenue, and the dashboards for both sides.
• Crypto settlements. We connected settlements in TON and USDT — topping up budgets and paying out publishers — and tied them to trustworthy event accounting.
• Launch and infrastructure. We deployed the environment behind Cloudflare with subdomains and certificates, and set up the landing page, moderation and the public API.

17The result

The outcome is not "sticking banners on a site" but a standalone public ad network with crypto settlements, two dashboards, anti-fraud and moderation — a product that connects advertisers and publishers directly.

• The advertiser launches a campaign with a clear payment format and targeting, seeing what they pay for.
• The publisher monetizes traffic with a large revenue share and crypto payouts paid directly.
• Anti-fraud and trustworthy tracking remove a whole class of problems: fraud, bot impressions and wasted budgets.
• The architecture is split across subdomains and ready to scale, while the public API opens the path to integrations.

18Takeaways

Adgora is an example of how engineering rigor turns a "trendy topic" into a working market. The most valuable thing here is not that the product "shows ads for crypto" but how it does it: with transparent economics, trustworthy event accounting, fraud protection and an honest publisher share. It is precisely these unflashy but critical details that set a production-grade ad network apart from yet another banner exchange.

It is worth highlighting the approach to legacy: we did not rewrite the proven serving engine from scratch but refactored it and grew new things on top — crypto settlements, anti-fraud, modern dashboards and analytics. This let us focus on what truly sets Adgora apart from classic networks rather than on reinventing the basic mechanics of serving.

For us this was a project at the intersection of adtech, blockchain and high-load infrastructure — exactly the kind of task where both product thinking and engineering discipline matter. If you need an advertising network, a two-sided marketplace, a blockchain integration or a complex service with a public API and dashboards — we know how to take such things all the way to launch.