The startup plans to open the spigot for its BAT cryptocurrency to help promote use of its system for privacy-first online ads.
Startup Brave soon will give cryptocurrency-like payment tokens to anyone using the ad-blocking web browser, a move that won't let you line your own pockets but that will make it easier to fund the websites you visit.
Brave developed the basic attention token (BAT) as an alternative to regular money for the payments that flow from advertiser to website publishers. Brave plans to use BAT more broadly, though, for example also sending a portion of advertising revenue to you if you're using Brave and letting you spend BAT for premium content like news articles that otherwise would be behind a subscription paywall.
Most of that is in the future, though. Today, Brave can send BAT to website publishers, YouTubers and Twitch videogame streamers, all of whom can convert that BAT into ordinary money once they're verified. You can buy BAT on your own, but Brave has given away millions of dollars' worth through a few promotions. The next phase of the plan, though, is just to automatically lavish BAT on anyone using Brave, so you won't have to fret that you missed a promotional giveaway.
We're getting to the point where we're giving users BAT all the time. We don't think we'll run out. We think users should get it," CEO and former Firefox leader Brendan Eich said. "We're going to do it continually."
The BAT giveaway plan is an important new phase in Brave's effort to salvage what's good about advertising on the internet -- free access to useful or entertaining services like Facebook, Google search and YouTube -- without downsides like privacy invasion and the sorts of political manipulations that Facebook partner Cambridge Analytica tried to enable.
BAT isn't a big force on the internet today, but Brave has grown to 2 million monthly users, and BAT is key to Brave's attempt to shift to ads that can be targeted to your own interests while also protecting your privacy. The free Brave browser is available for personal computers and smartphones, but for now only the PC version can handle the BAT payment system.
Token giveaway starts by June !!!
Source : https://www.cnet.com/news/ad-blocking-brave-browser-to-give-crypto-payment-tokens-to-everyone/