Movin’ On Up, Basic Attention Token (BAT) + Brave Browser, Real Blockchain Use Cases

4 min readOct 28, 2018

BAT has seen a steady rise in price since October 11th ($0.17) with three major plateaus on October 17th with a high of $0.22, October 20th high at $0.25 and an October 22nd high at $0.29. Overall, BAT has experienced a 52% gain in the past month as of the time of this writing on October 23rd. The rise in price is attributed to several announcements online from Coinbase’s summer announcement of upcoming listings and the launch of the new Brave Browser on October 18th.

While BAT was surging other major alt coins like Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) were down 1.9% and 1.2% respectively.

“The Coinbase Effect”

On July 13th, Coinbase announced that they were looking into listing five different crypto assets; Cardano (ADA), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Zcash (ZEC), and 0x (ZRX). After this announcement, all of these tokens experienced a rise in price, this has been deemed the “Coinbase Effect,” and has been consistently seen since the jump in the price of Litecoin (LTC) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) were listed.

After significant price surges of all five assets, Coinbase made a statement on Twitter reminding people that they have not approved the listing of these tokens yet. It was not until October 16th that the first ERC-20 Token to be listed on Coinbase 0x was approved and open for trading. After this announcement we saw a rise in the price of the remaining four assets but none as much as the BAT, with the four assets rising no more than 8%.

New Brave Browser

On October 18th, Brave announced their new “redesigned Chromium-based desktop version replac[ing] the previous Muon-based browser and delivers 22% faster load time”. They have also been cited as being faster in the mobile browser industry compared to Chrome. Brave is a privacy-based web browser that by default blocks intrusive ads and replaces them with relevant ads that do not track you. On its homepage, Brave shows the number of ads and trackers that have been blocked saving the user time and protecting them from malware (Figure 2). Since privacy and security are their top priority, Brave does not store your browsing data such as passwords and information you enter online the way Chrome does. They also do not sell the data collected to a third party.

Instead Brave is promoting a new monetization model that anonymously captures user attention to accurately reward publishers along with users themselves. Here Brave uses BAT to introduce a decentralized digital advertising exchange based on the Ethereum Blockchain. BAT is used to “obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services” between publishers, advertisers, and users (Figure 3). The utility of the token is based on user’s attention, a methodology outlined on their site. At the beginning of this year Brave gave away $1 million worth of BAT to build what it hopes to be a better advertising system.

In the past week alone twitter sentiment for BAT has been positive overall. Showing much enthusiasm for a new monetization model that rewards users giving them more control over their personal data. Here many users claim Brave + BAT is putting tokenization models to real-world use cases. Investors should keep an eye on BAT and whether more advertisers begin to leverage this tokenized platform.