Where Basic Attention Token is Accepted Locally and Globally
BAT is the ERC-20 token powering the Brave privacy browser (which you should be using!) that makes online advertising fair, paying you for viewing ads instead of selling your attention and data to the highest bidder. Having attained a top 100 market cap ranking, it’s also accepted as payment by crypto-friendly merchants around the world, from a London-based architectural firm to a veteran American copywriter.
Who Accepts Basic Attention Token…
Are you an Entrepreneur, freelancer, or manager of a business accepting cryptocurrency?
Should you buy BAT?
If you use the Brave browser you probably already have some BAT in your browser wallet, you earn it just for viewing ads. If you believe in the Brave mission and oppose big tech building a dystopia just to make us click on ads, maybe you want to hold buy some Brave and use it to support the content you love on the internet.
The team behind the Brave browser is impressive, lead by Brendan Eich, inventor of Javascript and founder of the Mozilla (Firefox browser). Amazingly, in its ICO it received $35 million in less than a minute and grew to become the most used crypto project. But, it’s unclear whether the popularity of the browser translates into the BAT price, in 2021 its price ran up to an all-time high and then crashed with Bitcoin. Investing heavily in BAT would be a bet that the masses will switch their default browser, take back their privacy from Big Tech’s advertising networks, and even use it to reward their favorite creators.
About
The Brave Software, the firm behind BAT, is not scandal-free; they’ve been caught hijacking affiliate links to places like Binance. As much as I like using the Brave browser and its mission to make the internet a faster, freer place, their scandals confirm something I’ve long suspected, San Francisco is a shady place! It seems like nearly every time I research a crypto project based in San Francisco they are involved with some embarrassing scandal.
The Basic Attention Token solves the endemic inefficiencies and privacy violations hobbling the digital ad industry. Get Brave White Paper. BAT has seen stunning results since its integration into the Brave browser’s first global private ad platform: 22.2 million monthly active users
Digital advertising is broken. The marketplace for online advertising, once dominated by advertisers, publishers and users, has become overrun by “middleman” ad exchanges, audience segmentation, complicated behavioral and cross-device user tracking, and opaque cross-party sharing through data management platforms.
Users face unprecedented levels of malvertisements and privacy violations. Mobile advertising results in as much as $23 per month in data charges on the average user’s data plan, slow page loads, and as much as 21% less battery life. In response, over 600 million mobile devices and desktops (globally) employ ad blocking software and this number is growing. Traditional publishers have lost approximately
66% of their revenue over the past decade, adjusted for inflation. Publishers face falling revenue, users feel increasingly violated, and advertisers’ ability to assess effectiveness is diminished. The solution is a decentralized, transparent digital ad exchange based on Blockchain. The first component is Brave, a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks third party ads and trackers, and builds in a ledger system that measures user attention to reward publishers accordingly. Brave will now introduce BAT (Basic Attention Token), a token for a decentralized ad exchange. It compensates the browser user for attention while protecting privacy.
BAT connects advertisers, publishers, and users and is denominated by relevant user attention, while removing social and economic costs associated with existing ad networks, e.g., fraud, privacy violations, and malvertising. BAT is a payment system that rewards and protects the user while giving better conversion to advertisers and higher yield to publishers. We see BAT and associated technologies as a future part of web standards, solving the important problem of monetizing publisher content while protecting user privacy.
From the Basic Attention Token whitepaper
