The problem Zesty Market solves

Zesty Market is a decentralized advertising network. It seeks to be an alternative to dominant centralized advertising networks which have resulted in anti-competitive practices. Such anti-competitive practices include things such as opaque commissions and fees, which stifle the flow of revenue from advertisers to smaller content creators. A lack of transparency also makes advertising fraud hard to detect. Zesty Market seeks to allow publisher to achieve better price discovery of their advertising spaces; provide advertisers a peace of mind through better transparency; and enable consumers to browse the Internet without fear of privacy infringing data extraction. Zesty Market uses a novel Auction Hash Timelock mechanism augmented with Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing to facilitate value transfer. By mediating the exchange between advertisers and publishers as delivery versus payment system the protocol is able to guarantee the transfer of funds upon sufficient completion of an advertising service without a centralized intermediary.

Challenges we ran into

Time limits. We weren't able to implement the validator nodes and had to mock it up. The actual implementation requires the use of publicly verifiable secret sharing with offchain nodes. This was not feasible to do in the time limits. We ended up using a mock Python node which uses Shamir secret sharing.

UI. There were bugs in the UI and we didn't have time to complete it so we ended up demoing with remix. This is not ideal, we hope the idea is clear enough.