For years, programmatic buyers could see who got paid in a transaction. They rarely saw every company that handled a bid request before it reached them.
IAB Tech Lab wants to vary that.
Today, the organization proposed an update to its OpenRTB SupplyChain Object, commonly referred to as schain, exposing each the business and technical journey of a bid request. If adopted, the change could reshape supply-path optimization by showing buyers not only who earned revenue from a transaction, but who touched it along the best way.
The proposed standard, SupplyChain v1.1, is on the market for public comment through Aug. 21, 2026.
Looking beyond the cash trail
Today’s schain standard gives buyers visibility into the financial path of a transaction by identifying corporations participating within the payment flow. It doesn’t necessarily reveal every company that processes, routes, enriches, or transmits a bid request.
That distinction matters more as programmatic infrastructure grows increasingly complex. A single impression opportunity may go through ad servers, Prebid implementations, SDKs, server-side ad insertion platforms, wrappers, and other technologies before reaching a buyer.
Under the proposal, buyers could also see those participants. “This is one of the crucial significant transparency enhancements to the digital promoting supply chain in years,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, said in a release.
The update goals to provide buyers a more complete record of inventory available on the open web.
Why advertisers care
The proposal arrives as advertisers search for methods to cut back waste and optimize supply chains. Much of the industry’s SPO work focuses on finding the shortest path between publisher and buyer. The prevailing assumption is that fewer intermediaries result in greater efficiency.
SupplyChain v1.1 challenges that assumption.
Longer supply chains don’t robotically represent worse supply chains if buyers can see and evaluate every participant. That idea may carry broader implications than the technical update itself.
Instead of simply counting intermediaries, buyers could evaluate what each participant contributes. A supply path with more participants may deliver more value than a shorter one if every participant performs a useful function and the method stays transparent.
The conversation shifts from “How short is that this path?” to “Who participates on this path and why?”
Transparency creates winners and losers
Not every company within the ecosystem will welcome that shift.
Advertisers spent years pushing for greater visibility into inventory getting packaged, routed, and sold. More transparency could expose redundant infrastructure, duplicate bid requests, and intermediaries who add little value.
That scrutiny could create challenges for vendors struggling to clarify their role within the transaction chain. At the identical time, corporations delivering measurable value gain a stronger opportunity to differentiate themselves from competitors.
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The proposal turns technical participation into something buyers can evaluate reasonably than something hidden behind the scenes.
How the update works
The working group behind the proposal evaluated several implementation approaches before choosing one incorporating technical custody information directly into the present schain framework. Companies that take technical custody of a request but don’t take part in the payment flow would receive an hp=0 designation.
According to IAB Tech Lab, that approach preserves compatibility with the present standard while expanding visibility into requests as they move through the ecosystem.
The organization also expects longer schains as transparency increases. To support adoption, IAB Tech Lab plans to publish rollout guidance encouraging SSPs and DSPs to conduct staged testing, validate parsing behavior, monitor bid health, and step by step scale traffic using the brand new specification.
The post Advertisers may finally see who really touches their bid requests appeared first on MarTech.
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