Meet Attrace: A Custom Blockchain Built for Affiliate Marketing [Video]

The headlines read something like “She Made $30,000 Per Month on Amazon at 24 Years Old.” They’re popular YouTube advertisements, where a beautiful person is self-filming a video in front of some expensive cars explaining how they got rich, and of course, how you can too. It’s called affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a burgeoning industry that is expected to hit $6.8 billion by 2020. The premise is simple. A publisher promotes a product to their followers through a special link. That link can track if anyone made a purchase at the recommendation of the publisher. If so, the publisher gets a cut of the sale.

It sounds great, but it has some problems. A link can’t perfectly track if a consumer purchased a product based on the recommendation of a publisher. The publisher’s cut of the product is quite small. And data can be hacked, manipulated, or abused. Ultimately the problems are based on the third parties that connect …