Alkimi, a programmatic advertising exchange founded in 2021, has rebuilt its entire technical stack on the Sui blockchain and its associated infrastructure layers. The company reported in a February 27 update that its platform is currently delivering more than 25 million ad impressions per day on this infrastructure. The Sui Foundation made its first-ever investment in an advertising technology company when it backed Alkimi on March 21, 2025.

What Alkimi Actually Does

Programmatic advertising works through automated auctions that run in milliseconds every time a webpage loads. In the standard model, a chain of intermediaries sits between the advertiser buying the ad and the publisher displaying it. These middlemen, known as demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs), take fees that collectively consume 30 to 50 percent or more of every advertising dollar. Publishers also typically wait 30 to 90 days for payment and have limited ability to verify which advertiser their ad served or at what margin they received payment.

Alkimi replaces this intermediary stack with smart contracts, software programs that execute and settle transactions automatically on the blockchain. The company says this compresses fees to 3 to 8 percent. Payments settle on-chain without the delays built into legacy ad networks.

The platform uses three components from Sui's technical ecosystem: Walrus for large-scale data storage, Nautilus for off-chain computation using Trusted Execution Environments (secure processing environments that keep data private while still allowing on-chain verification), and Seal for managing data access permissions without a centralized gatekeeper.

Ben Putley, Alkimi's CEO and co-founder, explained the company's rationale in comments published on the Sui Foundation blog: "Bringing it onchain isn't about replicating legacy systems, it's about giving advertisers, publishers, and users a fundamentally better experience."

Putley co-founded Alkimi alongside Chandru Narayanan, who previously built Virgin Media's targeted advertising platform and has worked with clients including BT, Cisco, and Vodafone. Their combined background in both programmatic infrastructure and large-scale telecom advertising is central to the founding team's credibility.

The Fraud Problem Behind the Build

The scale of waste in digital advertising gives context to why a blockchain-native rebuild has commercial logic. An estimated $84 billion in global digital advertising spend was lost to fraud in 2023, representing roughly 22 percent of all spend that year. According to projections cited in the companies' joint investment announcement, that figure could reach $172 billion by 2028 if the underlying infrastructure problems go unaddressed.

Fraud is particularly severe in parts of Asia. Connected TV carries invalid traffic rates of 33 to 36 percent across the Asia-Pacific region, the highest rates recorded globally. App install fraud is especially prevalent in India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. On-chain verification, which creates an auditable record of every transaction, is one proposed technical response to a problem the existing system has not yet solved.

Regional Implications: Asia and Africa

For publishers in South Asia and Africa, the most concrete implication of Alkimi's model may be in payment timing and transparency rather than in any abstract infrastructure argument.

Indian publishers operate within a programmatic market where Magnite holds approximately 36 percent of web SSP market share and Google Ad Exchange holds 22 percent. That concentration gives intermediaries structural pricing power over publishers. Direct on-chain settlement could reduce that leverage, at least in Alkimi's framing of how the model would work in practice. Digital ad spend across Asia-Pacific is growing at roughly 5.8 percent year over year in 2025, with programmatic capturing more than 80 percent of digital transactions by 2026, so the infrastructure question will only become more significant.

In Africa, the payment delay problem is compounded by currency volatility. Publishers in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa who receive programmatic revenue through Western intermediaries face both the standard 30 to 90 day wait and exposure to exchange rate movement during that period. On-chain settlement could eliminate the delay and, if settled in a stablecoin, the currency risk as well. South Africa's digital ad market is projected to reach $2.40 billion in spend this year, growing at a 17.3 percent compound annual rate through 2030. Those projections should be read in context: fewer than 30 percent of African businesses currently use AI-powered solutions, and blockchain technology remains largely at the pilot stage across the continent, meaning the path from technical promise to widespread adoption involves substantial groundwork.

The AI Agent Angle

Alkimi describes itself as "the world's first agentic media platform" and positions its infrastructure as ready for what the industry is calling agentic media buying: autonomous AI systems negotiating and settling advertising deals with each other in real time, without human approval at each step. EMarketer has projected that 2026 will mark the beginning of the end for manual programmatic buying as generative AI gives way to agentic AI, with fully autonomous agent-to-agent systems following as the next stage. PubMatic, an established supply-side platform, launched AgenticOS in January 2026, signaling broader industry movement toward agentic systems.

Whether Alkimi captures a meaningful share of this shift is an open question. The ALKIMI token, which migrated from Ethereum to Sui in August 2025, trades at approximately $0.0098 as of early March 2026. That puts the market cap at roughly $2.91 million with 300 million tokens in circulation, a price roughly 95 percent below the token's all-time high of $0.195. Token performance does not yet reflect the platform's commercial activity.

The programmatic advertising market was valued at approximately $834 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 22.5 percent compound annual rate through 2034. Whether blockchain infrastructure can capture a structural role in that market, rather than remaining a niche experiment, is the question Alkimi's next few years will have to answer.