Attrace
An on-chain attribution layer for honest affiliate marketing.
Attrace
9 mo
A custom blockchain, account node, and merchant entry point — engineered from scratch to a launched MVP, then picked up by advertisers and publisher firms on rollout.
3T
Trust, Tracking, Transparency — the three problems on-chain attribution events solve for merchants who can't verify the numbers a middleman reports.
Attrace is a decentralized affiliate marketing network that bridges publishers (like e-commerce websites) and advertisers (like merchants), based in the Netherlands. The platform registers and audits every action between parties, so progress is transparent and accurate by construction rather than by anyone’s word for it.
Attrace’s approach makes the regulating middleman obsolete. Affiliate marketing is paid on sales achieved, and Attrace targets every customer size — from big merchants to tiny blogs — by solving the tracking and trust gap between them. The blockchain underneath also clears payments faster, which keeps cash flow steady for the publishers depending on it.
We joined Attrace as embedded engineers during the earliest protocol builds — co-designing the consensus mechanism with their CTO, owning the Account Node, and growing the team in Vietnam alongside the Netherlands-based founders. The goal was never a single deliverable; it was a network the Attrace team could keep evolving on their own.
Operating an SME with affiliate marketing means trusting an agency you have little visibility into, paying entry costs that price out smaller publishers, and reading reports you can't independently verify. Merchants struggle to track cash flow, can't see the real number of clicks per product, and don't know how many of those clicks turned into purchases. The wall between merchants and publishers is exactly where fraudulent agencies operate — and the entry point Attrace set out to close.
Logging a transaction on every user interaction makes Ethereum unworkable — the gas costs are far from reasonable and the throughput is too slow for click-grade events. We spent the early months with Roel, Attrace's CTO, drafting the consensus protocol from scratch and building the first blocks. The reward is a chain whose throughput and economics fit attribution events specifically; the cost was trial-and-fail with no convenient framework to fall back on.
The Public Node is the backbone — PoS consensus, electing, producing, and validating, where most of the protocol-design work lived. The Account Node sits next to each user, holding private data and listening to the public chain, with a GDPR-grade privacy posture and a bootstrap target measured in minutes rather than tens of minutes. attrace.com is where merchants and publishers actually set up agreements — a UI that turns custom commission terms into a few clicks, backed by an API designed to stay backward-compatible as the protocol evolves.
“After 3 months, they left us with great development and improvement, in terms of work result and team synchronization. A worthy evidence for Attrace’s investments — and we hope to keep going with them in the long term.”
Erwin — CEO & Founder, AttraceA few sentences about your team and what you're building is usually enough. We reply within three working days.