Basic Attention Token

Founding and Vision Brave was founded in May 2015 by Brendan Eich, creator of the Javascript programming language and Mozilla Firefox, and Brian Bondy, on the premise that digital advertising is broken and in need of an overhaul. At the center of the problem are middlemen and cross-party data sharing, which have introduced a wide-range of problems for publishers, advertisers and users. Users have lost their privacy, pay high charges to download ads, and experience slow page load times. Publishers have lost billions in revenue to new middlemen. Advertisers face poor reporting and targeting.

To address these issues Eich and Bondy outlined a new vision for digital advertising. With Brave they aim to fix the digital advertising industry through disintermediating middlemen, enhancing user privacy, and distributing economic value more equitably across the digital advertising ecosystem.

In January 2016, Brave launched the first version of Brave with a built in ad-blocking feature. With Brave user's browsing data is kept private, with third party trackers being automatically blocked. By August 2016, the company had received at more than $7 million in funding from prominent venture firms, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and the Digital Currency Group.

Basic Attention Token Launch The Brave browser's tipping feature initially supported Bitcoin; however, due to concerns over Bitcoin's scalability, the project pivoted to a new cryptocurrency that could meet the needs of the burgeoning Brave ecosystem. In a blog post released in March 2017 Brave announced a new blockchain-based digital advertising platform using an innovative Ethereum-based utility token called Basic Attention Token (BAT).

Just months after announcing the project, in May 2017, Brave launched BAT, selling 1 billion tokens in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), raising more than $35 million in just 30 minutes. The company set aside the remaining 500 million of the 1.5 billion total token supply for a user growth pool and development team pool. In early December 2017, the company disbursed the first round of its user growth pool grants to new users on a first-come first-served basis.

Brave Growth Since April 2019, Brave users can opt in to Brave Rewards, which sends BAT micropayments to websites and content creators. Users receive 70% of the ad revenue share as a reward for their attention, which they can auto-contribute to publishers under default settings. Brave can automatically distribute users' contributions based on how much time they spend on sites, or distribute users' contributions according to their choosing.

In November 2019 Brave launched Brave 1.0, offering Brave Rewards to fund the open web, Brave Ads to compensate users for their attention, and Brave Shields to block ads and trackers. Brave now hosts more than 29 million monthly active users (MAUs). As of February 2021, over 1,000,000 publishers were registered on Brave.