Adshares vs Coinzilla: the open protocol with no open door against the €100 incumbent

Adshares and Coinzilla sit next to each other in almost every “best crypto ad networks” list published this year, usually with the same two-line summaries the lists have carried since 2021. Put them next to each other for real and the comparison is not close, but it is instructive, because the two represent opposite answers to the same question: should a crypto ad network be a company you sign a contract with, or a protocol nobody owns? We have reviewed both in depth — Adshares at 3/10, Coinzilla at 9/10 — we have no stake in either, and every number below was read from the two projects’ own pages, legal documents and public status endpoints on 26 September 2026.

The short answer

Coinzilla is an advertising company: a dashboard, a sales team, an account manager, an invoice with a registration number on it. Adshares is a blockchain and a set of open-source programs, and it insists on the distinction. You do not sign up with Adshares; you sign up with an “ad server” that somebody has deployed on its software, and the servers settle with one another on the ADS chain. In 2021 that was an interesting alternative. In 2026 it is a theoretical one, because the campaign button on adshares.net leads to a dead host and both of the ad servers the project lists as active have closed their doors to new accounts. If you have a budget to spend this month, the comparison ends at the front door; the rest of this page is about what sits behind each one.

Getting in: a €100 deposit against a door that does not open

Coinzilla’s terms and conditions say that advertisers “have to pay to the Company, in advance, a minimum amount of EUR 100”, spendable on any campaign type — display, native, pop-under or press release. Deposits arrive by bank transfer or in crypto (BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, USDC, USDT and others), converted to euros by a payment processor at the moment they confirm. It is the lowest entry among the premium-tier networks, and we keep it alongside every other floor in our payouts and minimums table.

Adshares publishes no minimum deposit, no rate card and no pricing model, which would be forgivable for a protocol if the protocol had a working entrance. It does not. Every page of adshares.net carries a “Launch campaign” button pointing at web3ads.net, and web3ads.net answers with Cloudflare’s error 520, the code that means the host itself is down. We have seen the same page on 25 August, 6 and 17 September, and again on 26 September in a real browser from two different countries. The “See all adservers” page at adshares.net/network returns an internal server error, and because the homepage draws its live figures from it, the marketing site itself now displays “Total SSPs 0”, “Active campaigns 0” and “Ad served 0.00”.

The documentation offers a second route: two named ad servers, Adaround and Flyer Square, where “you can create publisher and advertiser account”. Both publish a status page anyone can open, and on 26 September both said the same thing: registration mode restricted, campaigns zero, sites zero. Adaround has 158 accounts on file and Flyer Square 52, four and three fewer respectively than when we checked nine days earlier. The Adaround login screen ends with the words “Don’t have an account?” and nothing follows the question. Adshares fails the four-minute alive check we recommend before any deposit at every door we could find.

Who you are dealing with

Coinzilla’s terms name their counterparty: Sevio Digital Limited, a private company limited by shares, registration number 729804, at an address on Harcourt Street in Dublin 2. The about page dates the project to November 2016. Individuals go through an identity check run by iDenfy, a Lithuanian KYC provider the terms name and locate, and legal entities are verified separately — the whole process is set against the other networks’ checks in our KYC comparison. You may not enjoy the paperwork, but you know whom to sue.

Adshares names nobody. No company, address, registration number, founder or team member appears anywhere on adshares.net; the FAQ entry “Who founded Adshares? How to reach the team?” is answered, in full, with an invitation to write on Discord. The only legal identity we could locate is a Polish limited-liability company, Adshares sp. z o.o., in a link attribute inside the AdServer software’s README on GitHub. The one enforceable document in the entire chain of pages is Adaround’s terms, and that document is the generic “Use License / Disclaimer / Limitations” website template, governed by “the laws of São Tomé and Príncipe”. It says nothing about advertising, deposits, refunds, payouts or prohibited content. For a project whose pitch is on-chain transparency, the people and the paperwork are unusually hard to find.

Fees: the 0.1% chain and the 25% ad server

The homepage bullets read “Eliminate middlemen” and “Transparent fees”, and the fee the FAQ describes is the blockchain’s: 0.1% on transfers between nodes, 0.05% within a node. That figure is real and it is tiny. It is also not what an advertiser or a publisher pays. The status pages of the two operating ad servers publish their commercial terms in plain fields: a demand fee of 0.2575 and a supply fee of 0.25, that is 25.75% taken from the advertiser’s spend and 25% from the publisher’s earnings before the two sides meet, plus a joining fee of 100 ADS, about $48 at the day’s price. The middleman was not eliminated. It was renamed “ad server” and given a bigger cut than most middlemen admit to.

Coinzilla, to be fair to Adshares, publishes no revenue share at all; neither do Bitmedia or Cointraffic. What Coinzilla publishes instead is the price you pay: a bidding platform where display and native CPMs run from about €0.20 on awareness inventory to €3 and above on premium placements, fixed-price marketplace deals, and press-release packages at €1,999, €4,999 and €9,999 with the outlet counts listed. Its marketplace catalogue sits behind a login, which we hold against it in our marketplace comparison. But between a network that hides its margin and shows its prices, and a protocol that advertises a 0.1% fee over ad servers charging a quarter of every euro, the advertiser is better served by the first.

The publisher side: euros on a schedule, or a coin with pool liquidity

Coinzilla’s publisher page promises payment “automatically weekly or monthly, based on your preferences”, and withdrawals “with no costs via BTC, ETH, USDT (ERC20), or Bank Wire (SEPA/SWIFT)”; the terms set the minimum at €50 and, less generously, state that the company “will not cover the fees and commissions related to any transaction (including conversion costs)” on crypto payouts, nor the bank’s charges on wires. The roster it shows off — etherscan.io, coingecko.com, dextools.io, blockchain.com, coinstats.app — is the strongest in the category, and the homepage claims 1B+ impressions and 2,000+ websites a month. It publishes no traffic threshold for new sites, which is the one structural gap our review holds against it.

Adshares publishes no payout minimum, no schedule and no approval standard, because there is no application to make. What it does state is the currency: “All settlements within the ecosystem are done in ADS Coin.” That sentence carries the whole publisher-side risk. On 26 September CoinGecko priced ADS at about $0.48, a market capitalisation near $18.8 million and daily volume of roughly $270,000, and listed only decentralised-exchange pools — Uniswap on Ethereum and Base, and QuickSwap — as places to sell it. The coin traded at $5.72 in April 2022; it has since lost about 91% of that. A publisher paid in ADS holds an asset that can be sold only into pools of that depth, and the FAQ adds an inactivity fee of one per mille roughly every two weeks on accounts idle for two years, which on a network whose ad servers have stopped is the fee most likely to be collected.

Terms, refunds and identity checks

Coinzilla’s refund policy is brief and unfriendly: “ALL AMOUNTS PAID BY ADVERTISING AGENTS AND REFLECTED IN USERS’ ACCOUNTS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE”, capital letters theirs. You may pause or stop any campaign and reallocate the balance, but it never leaves the account. Our review argues this is a compliance fence rather than a money grab, since a crypto deposit refunded back out is exactly what anti-money-laundering rules flag, and our refund comparison shows the clause is the sector’s norm rather than its exception.

Adshares cannot be graded on its refund clause because it has no terms to hold one. Its privacy policy, “Last Updated: May 8, 2020”, asks you to “please also review our terms of use”, which it says limit liability and impose individual arbitration; the two addresses where such a page would live both return 404, and the footer carries no terms link. Nothing anywhere in the flow asks for identity, because nobody is processing applications. Our seven red flags in ad network terms assume a document exists to read. The Adshares red flag is the blank page.

Signs of life

Coinzilla’s site changes under our feet. Its press-release packages were restructured into three families in September 2026, its terms and conditions moved to a new address, its marketplace landing page stopped showing prices, and a prediction-markets page now sits on the advertiser side. It is what a business with staff looks like from the outside. The Trustpilot profile adds four reviews in the last twelve months, which for a self-serve platform with thousands of small accounts is quiet rather than dead.

Adshares’ timeline runs the other way. The newest post on its blog is dated 10 October 2023. The AdServer software’s latest release, v2.9.0, is dated 12 June 2024, and the newest change to any of the project’s own product repositories is from December 2024. The block explorer for the ADS chain — a chain whose sole purpose is to settle advertising — showed its most recent transactions at “4 months ago” on 17 September, and showed exactly the same reading on 26 September, which means nothing at all has moved on it in between. The single line on the site that says 2026 is the copyright in the footer, which updates itself.

Trustpilot, and what one review is worth

Coinzilla scores 3.5, “Average”, across 104 reviews, and the number has held steady through every check we have made since July. The complaints cluster where you would expect: the non-refundable rule and publisher rejections. Adshares’ profile is unclaimed, holds one review, and scores 3.2 on it. The review is the most useful document in this comparison: a Spanish publisher wrote in May 2021 that it was “an excellent advertising network from a publisher’s point of view”, that you are paid in ADS and can swap to Bitcoin easily, and that it was “really the alternative to Google AdSense”. On 5 January 2025 the same reviewer added an update: a shame, but it has stopped working. That is the entire independent record of Adshares as a network: one satisfied user documenting the end of the service.

Side by side

	Adshares	Coinzilla
What it is	Open-source protocol and ADS blockchain; you join a third-party “ad server”	Self-serve network run by Sevio Digital Limited, Dublin
Can you sign up today?	No: campaign button returns a 520 error; both listed ad servers restricted	Yes, after an identity check
Advertiser minimum	Not published	€100, in the terms
Fees	0.1% chain fee, plus 25.75% advertiser / 25% publisher at the ad servers, plus 100 ADS to join	Revenue share not published; CPMs from about €0.20 to €3+
Refunds	No terms exist	All amounts non-refundable
Publisher payout	ADS coin only; no minimum or schedule published	€50 minimum, weekly or monthly, BTC/ETH/USDT or wire
Publisher entry	No application possible	No published traffic threshold; manual review
Last visible activity	Blog Oct 2023; software Jun 2024; chain idle for months	Packages restructured Sep 2026; new verticals in 2026
Trustpilot	3.2 across 1 review, unclaimed	3.5 across 104
Our rating	3/10	9/10

When Adshares is the right call

There is one. If you are a technical team that wants to run its own ad server — inside a game, a metaverse world or a publisher group — and settle with partners on a chain you can audit, the Adshares stack is genuinely open source, documented down to the OpenRTB integration, and still installable. That is a software decision, not an ad buy, and it comes with the obligation to bring your own advertisers, because the network will not supply any. If what drew you to Adshares was wallet-native inventory, the working version of that idea is HypeLab (7/10); if it was anonymous, low-friction crypto display, A-ADS (7/10) has been settling in Bitcoin since 2011 and its door opens. For everything else, and for anyone comparing Coinzilla against a live rival, our Cointraffic vs Coinzilla and Coinzilla vs Bitmedia head-to-heads are the pages to read next.

The bottom line

Coinzilla wins this comparison by default, and would have won it on merit. The €100 entry lets you test before you trust, the counterparty has a name and a registration number, the payouts arrive in currencies you can spend, and the terms, however unfriendly on refunds, exist and can be read before you pay — which is why it leads our 2026 ranking and Adshares sits on the watch list beneath it. Adshares built a real chain, published a fee schedule more honest than any of its competitors’, and then stopped selling ads on it; the lists that still recommend it as a live alternative have not pressed the button we pressed. If the network reopens a door, we will re-test it and say so. Until then this is a comparison between a network and a codebase, and only one of them takes campaigns.

Adshares vs Coinzilla FAQ

Is Adshares still an active ad network in 2026?

Not in any way an advertiser or publisher can use. The site’s campaign button has led to a 520 server error since August 2026, the ad-server directory returns an internal server error, and the two ad servers the documentation lists as active both have registration restricted with zero campaigns and zero sites. The blockchain, the coin and the open-source software still exist; the network on top of them has stopped.

What is the minimum deposit at Adshares vs Coinzilla?

Coinzilla’s terms require €100 paid in advance, by bank transfer or crypto, spendable on any campaign type and non-refundable once credited. Adshares publishes no minimum anywhere on its site or documentation; the only fee its operating ad servers state is a joining fee of 100 ADS, about $48 at the time of writing, and neither server currently accepts new accounts.

Which is cheaper, Adshares’ 0.1% fee or Coinzilla?

The 0.1% is the ADS blockchain’s transfer fee, not the cost of advertising. The ad servers that actually run campaigns on Adshares publish a 25.75% demand fee and a 25% supply fee, so more than half the value of a placement is taken between advertiser and publisher. Coinzilla does not publish its revenue share, but it publishes what you pay — bids from about €0.20 CPM and fixed PR packages from €1,999 — and it is the only one of the two where a campaign can be bought at all.

How do publishers get paid at Adshares vs Coinzilla?

Coinzilla pays weekly or monthly from a €50 minimum in BTC, ETH, USDC or by SEPA/SWIFT wire (USDT payouts ended in February 2025, per Coinzilla’s blog, though the publisher page still lists it), with conversion and bank fees deducted from the publisher’s side. Adshares settles only in ADS coin, which trades at about $0.48 on decentralised exchanges only and is down roughly 91% from its 2022 high; no payout minimum, schedule or fiat route is published, and no listed ad server will open a publisher account today.

Reviewed in full

• Adshares 3/10

  Open-source ad blockchain whose campaign button has returned a server error since August and whose ad servers are closed to new accounts

• Coinzilla 9/10

  The default choice in crypto advertising — quietly displacing older rivals.

• Cointraffic 7.5/10

  Premium crypto inventory and the friendliest payouts in the niche — three doors in, from €500 marketplace to €3,000 managed.

• Bitmedia 6.5/10

  The Web3 ad veteran with deep targeting — and a thinning footprint on premium crypto media.

• A-ADS 7/10

  The 2011 original — still anonymous, still cookie-less, still paying in BTC every day.

• HypeLab 7/10

  Ads where the wallets already are — the most engineering-dense young network in the niche.