Slise.xyz Q4 2023 Investor Updates — Year Wrapped
Let's make ads great again
Summary
2023 was a year when Slise happened. The idea turned into an actual product and a strong brand. Just a year later it’s hard to find a Web3 marketer who wouldn’t have heard about Slise, and if you take a random room of people at a crypto event, there will be a meaningful number of people who’ve seen our ads. That’s how deep our market penetration is.
Hands down, it was a tough year—the toughest of all, for crypto and for startups. But we’ve made it through and earned our right to live with sweat and blood. Next, only up and right.
We wouldn’t be here without you, our investors. From Alliance, who believed in us first, to Presto Ventures who put in the largest check in 2023. Thank you, guys, from me and the whole team.
2024 is going to be a year of progress, where we will discover our own way up, beyond what we’ve achieved already. We’re going to build, make big bets, and maintain the feeling of urgency like it is Day 1. With our team, resources, and fresh energy, we have everything needed to make it happen.
The waves we are riding in 2024
Mediation is the message
Last year, ad networks and affiliate networks brought efficient Web3 advertising one step closer by aggregating demand and supply and providing a scalable way for advertisers to reach end-users. However, this market is still fragmented due to the exclusive partnerships and custom tech stacks that make the whole market less efficient.
As we build for where the market is moving versus where it is today, we see the next obvious progression step in a single mediation protocol uniting ad providers and publishers in a free market powered via an open auction. It happened before in Web2 AdTech and it’s inevitable to Web3. The ability to bid for an ad impression on a public ad exchange is going to introduce a real programmatic experience to Web3 advertising and will help to maximize revenue and minimize the risks for all the participants in the market:
higher fill rates and higher revenue for publishers;
wider coverage and more data for advertisers;
higher flexibility with lower risks for ad providers.
For Slise’s business, it means a new revenue structure based not only on direct ad sales but also on infrastructure usage fees across a much wider network of publishers and a network of ad partners who will also win from this integration.
What’s more, this strategy opens a path to a future where an ad exchange can be decentralized on a fast Layer-2 rollup with bidding done transparently via smart contracts and user data accessible only in the form of ZK-proofs.
The transparency of a decentralized network is important to solve trust issues dominating in the ad market today, with $61B lost in click fraud and biased algorithms giving preference to specific bidders. Our goal is to provide a composable protocol that can be trusted and used to build even better and more advanced marketing tools.
Solana surge and bitcoin halving
The end of 2023 was rich in big market moves producing waves that are yet to reach our coast. Consumer hype and mass adoption are two of, if not, the most important factors of our growth, and we anticipate even bigger market moves in 2024 that will shake the ground under our feet.
Even today, with Solana volume going up 700% we see an influx of new users at our publishers that will be followed by a desire of the projects to capture their attention. We can’t predict when the real bull run will come and how big it will be, but even local growth in the following few months will provide valuable information about the potential of the ads in an up market that we can extrapolate in the future.
New Year — new budgets
January is on track to become our most successful month by the number of closed deals thanks to all the conversations that got dragged on from last year when people couldn’t launch new campaigns right before the holidays.
Seasonality plus fresh energy and desire to grow are driving not only us, but everyone around.
We’re excited to see what else 2024 has prepared for us and ready to grab it with both hands. If the last year was “the year when Slise happened”, this one must be “the year when Slise made it big.”
Oleksii, CEO
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