Adshares review
Open-source ad blockchain whose campaign button has returned a server error since August and whose ad servers are closed to new accounts
Adshares is the network every “best crypto ad networks” list still recommends and almost nobody has tried to join lately. We tried. The “Launch campaign” button on every page of adshares.net sends you to web3ads.net, which has answered with a Cloudflare 520 server error on every visit we have made since August 25, 2026, the latest on September 17 in a real browser. The page that is supposed to list the network’s ad servers returns an internal server error, which is why every live counter on the marketing site reads zero. The two ad servers its own documentation calls “active” were online until late October 2026 with registration closed, zero campaigns and zero sites, and have answered a Cloudflare 521 error on every page since. Adshares built a genuine blockchain for advertising, open-sourced the whole stack, and then stopped selling ads on it. Our score is 3/10.
Key points
- Adshares is a protocol and a blockchain (ADS, mainnet 2018), not a company you deposit with: advertisers and publishers are supposed to join an “ad server” run on its open-source software, and the site’s own entry point, web3ads.net, has returned a 520 server error on every check since August 25, 2026.
- The two ad servers the documentation lists as active, Adaround and Flyer Square, both had registration set to restricted and published zero campaigns and zero sites between them, and both have answered a Cloudflare 521 error on every page since late October 2026 (checked on 1 and 3 November); their fee schedule is 25.75% on the advertiser side and 25% on the publisher side, against a homepage that promises to “eliminate middlemen”.
- Last blog post October 10, 2023; last AdServer release June 12, 2024; the newest transactions in the ADS block explorer are about four months old; the documentation’s copyright stops at 2024.
- There are no terms of service on adshares.net. The privacy policy, last updated May 8, 2020, tells you to read terms of use that do not exist; the only contract behind a working ad server is a generic website template governed by the law of São Tomé and Príncipe.
- All settlement is in the ADS coin, down about 92% from its April 2022 high and traded only on decentralised exchange pools according to CoinGecko; Trustpilot holds a single review, from a publisher who liked the network in 2021 and edited it in January 2025 to say it had stopped working. Rated 3/10.
What Adshares actually is
Most networks we review are a company with a dashboard. Adshares is neither. It describes itself as “the only full blockchain ecosystem for AdTech” and as a “Web3 & metaverse advertising standard”: a purpose-built chain called ADS, a coin of the same name, and a set of open-source services (AdServer, AdPay, AdSelect, AdUser, AdClassify) that anyone can run. Advertisers and publishers do not sign up with Adshares. They sign up with an ad server that somebody has deployed on the software, and the servers settle with each other on the chain, in ADS. The about page dates the idea to 2016, the official start to 2017 and the mainnet launch to 2018, and its timeline ends in 2021.
Who runs it is harder to say. No company name, address, registration number or team member appears anywhere on adshares.net. The FAQ question “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 find is a Polish limited-liability company, Adshares sp. z o.o., named in a link attribute inside the AdServer software’s README on GitHub. For a project whose pitch is transparency, the people behind it are unusually hard to locate.
A front door that has been closed since August
We first flagged Adshares in our 2026 ranking as “technically alive, functionally unreachable”, and promised a re-check. Here it is. On September 17, 2026, in a real browser, the “Launch campaign” button still hands you to web3ads.net, and web3ads.net still returns Cloudflare’s error 520, whose own diagnostic line says the browser and Cloudflare are fine and the host is the problem. That is the same result we got on August 25 and September 6. The “See all adservers” page at adshares.net/network returns a 500 internal server error, and because the homepage pulls its live figures from there, the site itself now advertises “Total SSPs 0”, “Active campaigns 0”, “Ad served 0.00”, “Integrated lands 0” and “Adservers 0 / Publishers 0”. We did not have to look for the bad news. The marketing site prints it.
The documentation offers a second way in: a page listing “active AdServers in Adshares Network”, with two names, adaround.net and flyersquare.com, where “you can create publisher and advertiser account”. Both were online until late October 2026. Both published a status endpoint that any visitor could open, and both reported the same thing: registration mode “restricted”, zero campaigns, zero sites. Adaround had 162 accounts on file and Flyer Square 55 when we first looked in September (160 and 51 on 18 October). Since then every page on both servers, the status endpoint and the login panel included, has answered a Cloudflare 521 error, the code Cloudflare returns when the server behind it is down; we saw it on 1 November and again on 3 November 2026. The Adaround login screen ends with “Don’t have an account?” and nothing follows the question, no sign-up link at all. Its footer reads version 2.8.0 while the server behind it reports 2.9.0. The four-minute alive check we recommend before any deposit has a single decisive step, click the signup button and see whether the machine behind it answers, and Adshares fails it at every door we could find.
The rest of the timeline agrees. The blog’s newest posts are dated October 10, 2023. The AdServer’s latest release, v2.9.0, is dated June 12, 2024, and the newest push to any of the project’s own product repositories is December 2024. The documentation’s footer stops at “2018-2024”. The block explorer for the ADS chain, whose sole purpose is to settle advertising, shows its most recent transactions at roughly four months old. The grants page still announces “Adshares Ventures”, a venture arm, with “Launch coming soon”. The one thing on the site that says 2026 is the copyright line in the footer.
For advertisers
On paper the offer is broad: display and native placements on websites, plus the format Adshares made its name on, billboards inside metaverse worlds and games, sold through a demand-side account on any ad server in the network and paid in ADS. The site publishes no minimum deposit, no CPM or CPC floor and no pricing model. AdPay, the settlement service, is described as deciding “what and how much to pay” for impressions, clicks and conversions, without a number anywhere. That is not unusual for a protocol; it is unusual for a page with a “Launch campaign” button.
What an advertiser can actually do today is limited to reading. The campaign button leads to a dead host, the two known ad servers are closed to new accounts and hold no live campaigns, and there is nobody named to email about it. The scale claims that would justify the effort of asking, “more than three hundred million impressions on a monthly basis across all adservers” on the about page, are undated and sit next to the sentence “More than 500 billion USD will be spent on digital ads in 2022”, which tells you when that page was last thought about. Metaverse inventory, the differentiator, shows “Metaverse views 0.00” and “Total metaverse revenue $0” on its own page. Named integrations, QuickSwap, MILC, TradingView, all date from 2023.
For publishers
Publishers face the same closed doors plus a currency problem. The FAQ says you can “join one of the AdServers and start monetizing for free”, but neither listed ad server will open an account, and the network page that would show you others is broken. Nothing on adshares.net states a minimum payout, a payout schedule or an approval standard for sites; there is no traffic threshold because there is no application. Everything settles in ADS, and the site’s own “where to buy” links point to Uniswap, PancakeSwap, QuickSwap, ApeSwap, Changelly and a BitMart pair. CoinGecko, as of September 17, lists only decentralised-exchange pools for the coin, Uniswap on Ethereum and Base and QuickSwap, at a price of about $0.46, a market capitalisation near $17.8 million and daily volume of roughly $640,000. The coin traded at $5.72 in April 2022. A publisher paid in ADS is paid in an asset that has lost about 92% of its value since then and can be sold only into pools of that depth.
One more clause matters for anyone who once earned here and left the coins in a wallet: the FAQ describes an “inactivity fee” of one per mille every 2,048 blocks, roughly every two weeks, applied to accounts idle for two years, with the proceeds sent to the staking fund. On a network whose ad servers have stopped, that is the fee most likely to be charged.
Pricing and payments
The fee Adshares advertises is the chain’s: 0.1% on transfers between nodes, 0.05% within a node, with 80% of that going to a staking pool and 20% to node operators. It is real and it is tiny. It is also not what a user pays. The status endpoints of both ad servers published their commercial fees while they were online: 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, plus a joining fee of 100 ADS, about $46 at today’s price. Coinzilla and Cointraffic do not publish their revenue share, and Bitmedia gives only a range (“commonly 10–20%”), so this is at least disclosure; but it sits under a homepage whose bullet points read “Eliminate middlemen” and “Transparent fees” and mention only the 0.1%. The middleman was not eliminated. It was renamed “ad server” and given half the margin.
Then there is the paperwork, or the absence of it. adshares.net has no terms of service. 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 URLs where such a document would live return 404, and the footer has no terms link. The only contract we could find behind a working ad server is Adaround’s, and it is the standard “Use License / Disclaimer / Limitations” website template: permission to download one copy of the materials for “personal, non-commercial transitory viewing”, no warranties, no liability, and “governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of São Tomé and Príncipe”. Nothing in it mentions deposits, refunds, payouts, prohibited content or identity checks. Our seven red flags in ad network terms assume there is a document to read. Here the red flag is the blank page.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Genuinely open source and self-hostable: AdServer, AdPay, AdSelect, AdUser and AdClassify are public repositories with installation docs, so a technical team can still run its own instance
- A real, purpose-built chain and wallet, with ADS wrapped to Ethereum, BSC, Polygon and Base at published contract addresses and a smart-contract audit referenced in the FAQ
- Protocol documentation, objects, actors, events, inventory formats, an OpenRTB 2.6 integration page, that is more thorough than most live networks manage
- The ad servers’ fee schedules were published in a machine-readable status page (offline since late October 2026), which is more than Coinzilla or Cointraffic disclose about their own margins, and more precise than Bitmedia’s “commonly 10–20%”
- Non-custodial wallet login and no identity check anywhere in the flow
Cons
- The site’s own “Launch campaign” button has led to a 520 server error on every check since August 25, 2026; the ad-server directory returns a 500, so every counter on the site reads zero
- Both ad servers listed as active have registration closed and report zero campaigns and zero sites
- Last blog post October 2023, last software release June 2024, newest chain transactions about four months old, “Adshares Ventures” still “coming soon”
- Advertised “eliminate middlemen” and “transparent fees” against a real 25.75% advertiser fee and 25% publisher fee on the only operating servers
- No terms of service on the domain, a 2020 privacy policy pointing to a document that 404s, and an ad-server contract that is a website template under São Tomé and Príncipe law
- No company, address or named person on the site; settlement only in a coin down about 92% from its 2022 high with decentralised-exchange liquidity only
Adshares vs alternatives
If what attracted you to Adshares was wallet-native, web3-flavoured inventory, the working versions of that idea are HypeLab (7/10), which sells in-app and wallet-aware placements with a named company and stablecoin payouts, and Slise (5.5/10), a web3-native display network with published terms and a payout schedule, though no published payout threshold and a $5,000 advertiser minimum. If it was the promise of on-chain transparency, note that Blockchain-Ads (4.5/10) sells the same story with a $10,000 minimum and a functioning dashboard, which is more than Adshares offers today and still not something we recommend. If it was simply low-friction crypto display, A-ADS (7/10) has been the anonymous, instant, Bitcoin-settled option since 2011 and its door opens, and Coinzilla (9/10) remains the default for premium placements with terms you can read before you pay; our Adshares vs Coinzilla head-to-head sets the two side by side, door by door. Our payouts and minimums comparison has the publisher-side numbers for all of them, which is a table Adshares cannot join, because it publishes none.
Trustpilot and what it actually means
Trustpilot has one review of adshares.net. The profile is unclaimed, the score is 3.2, there are no reviews in the last twelve months, and the single entry is worth reading in full. 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 convert to Bitcoin easily, and that it was “really the alternative to Google AdSense”. On January 5, 2025 the same reviewer added an update: a shame, but it has stopped working. That is the entire independent record, one satisfied user documenting the end of the service. The other review site that scores Adshares highly does so on the strength of two testimonials about selling timeshare properties, which we mention only so that you do not count them. The 2025 and 2026 listicles still recommending Adshares as a live network give no sign of having pressed the button we pressed.
Verdict
Our score is 3/10, and it is the lowest we have given to a network that was unmistakably real. TrafficSigma (3.5/10) scored higher because behind its contact form there may yet be a business; behind Adshares’ campaign button there is a server that has not answered in a month, ad servers that will not open an account, and a chain that has stopped recording trades. The three points are for what remains: a working open-source stack, honest documentation and a coin that still trades. A developer who wants to run a private ad exchange for a game or a metaverse world could do worse than clone these repositories. An advertiser with a budget or a publisher with traffic should treat Adshares as we now do in our graveyard of recommended networks: a name that lists keep alive after the network stopped. We will re-test the campaign button before this review’s next update. If it opens onto a platform with live campaigns, published terms and a named operator, the score will move.
Adshares FAQ
Is Adshares still active?
The website, the coin and the code are; the ad network is not, as far as anyone can use it. The “Launch campaign” link has returned a server error since at least August 25, 2026, the two ad servers listed as active have registration closed with zero campaigns and zero sites, the last blog post is from October 2023 and the last software release from June 2024.
How do you advertise on Adshares?
In principle by opening an advertiser account on any ad server running the Adshares software and funding it in ADS. In practice, on September 17, 2026, the site’s own campaign link is down and the known ad servers are not accepting new accounts, so there is no working path we could find.
What are Adshares’ fees?
The blockchain charges 0.1% on transfers between nodes and 0.05% within a node. The ad servers charge their own commercial fees on top: the two operating ones publish a 25.75% fee on advertiser spend, a 25% fee on publisher earnings and a joining fee of 100 ADS.
How are Adshares publishers paid?
In ADS coin only, through the ad server they joined. No minimum payout or payout schedule is published on adshares.net. Converting ADS to anything else currently means selling into decentralised-exchange pools; CoinGecko lists no centralised-exchange market for the coin.
Who owns Adshares?
The website names no company, address or person; the FAQ directs questions about the founders to Discord. The AdServer software’s README on GitHub attributes the project to Adshares sp. z o.o., a Polish limited-liability company. There are no terms of service on the site that would identify a contracting party.
Is the ADS coin the same as Adshares the network?
ADS is the settlement coin of the Adshares chain and trades independently of whether any ads are being served. On September 17, 2026 it was priced around $0.46 with a market capitalisation near $17.8 million, about 92% below its April 2022 high, while the network’s ad servers reported no live campaigns.
Sources
The figures above come from these pages, published by the companies themselves unless noted. "Checked" is the date we last read each page.
- Adshares homepage ("Eliminate middlemen", "Transparent fees", live counters reading zero, "Launch campaign" to web3ads.net) checked 1 Oct 2026
- Adshares FAQ (0.1% / 0.05% chain fees, 80/20 staking split, inactivity fee every 2,048 blocks after 2 years, team reachable only via Discord) checked 17 Oct 2026
- Adshares About page (founded 2016, mainnet 2018, "more than three hundred million impressions" monthly) checked 17 Sep 2026
- Adshares privacy policy (last updated May 8, 2020; refers to terms of use that do not exist) checked 28 Sep 2026
- ADS coin page (where-to-buy links: Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Changelly, BitMart) checked 28 Sep 2026
- Adshares metaverse page ("Metaverse views 0.00", "Total metaverse revenue $0") checked 17 Sep 2026
- Adshares blog (newest posts dated October 10, 2023) checked 28 Sep 2026
- Adshares docs: list of active ad servers (Adaround, Flyer Square; copyright 2018-2024) checked 28 Sep 2026
- Adaround login panel (no sign-up link, as read 28 Sep 2026; Cloudflare error 521 on 1 and 3 Nov 2026) checked 3 Nov 2026
- Adaround terms (generic website template, São Tomé and Príncipe law, as read 17 Sep 2026; Cloudflare error 521 on 1 and 3 Nov 2026) checked 3 Nov 2026
- ADS block explorer (newest transactions about four months old) checked 26 Sep 2026
- Adshares Trustpilot profile (a single review) checked 3 Nov 2026
- Adaround ad-server status page (26 Sep 2026: registration restricted, 0 campaigns, 0 sites, demand fee 0.2575, supply fee 0.25, 100 ADS joining fee; Cloudflare error 521 on 1 and 3 Nov 2026) checked 3 Nov 2026
- Flyer Square ad-server status page (26 Sep 2026: registration restricted, 0 campaigns, 0 sites, same fees; Cloudflare error 521 on 1 and 3 Nov 2026) checked 3 Nov 2026
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