ICO mania
You may have heard recently that the BAT ICO sold out in less than 30 seconds, raising over $35 million USD. Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a digital advertising platform based on Ethereum smart contracts. The BAT allows publishers, advertisers, and users to connect in a “more efficient, transparent and decentralized marketplace that reduces fraud, privacy violations, and malvertisements while increasing publisher revenue.” The tokens will be exchanged in a secure, private, and anonymous advertising system based on the Brave browser and its mobile application.
Leadership
What I like about the token is that the Brave browser is founded by former Mozilla CEO and JavaScript creator Brendan Eich. The Brave browser is the platform he is developing. The pitch to consumers is faster loading times, tighter privacy controls and even the potential to earn money simply by reading content. I think that Brendan Eich has an impressive track record and that this project will do well with him and the helm.
Advertising
Advertising is not going anywhere soon. It will continue to be an important part of consumerism and coupled with blockchain technology, this could actually work. The issue is that BAT ecosystem will run off the Brave browser, and this is a crowded environment. Brendan's background with Mozilla Firefox will assist him here, but making users switch browsers will be inherently hard to do. Especially if they are going to be targeted by advertisers.
Issues
the ICO was dominated by a handful of individuals. Only around 130 people actually bought BAT, with one buyer scooping up $4.6 million of them (20,000 ETH worth). All in all, it was reported that five buyers acquired half of the total haul, while the 20 biggest spenders bought two-thirds of the available coins. There are even some reports that the BAT team bought the majority of the ICO themselves...
Whilst I believe that a successful crowd sale should be far and wide and diverse, I still believe that this will work for BAT. It's in the best interests of the ICO holders to hodl their coins and these large investors are less likely to cash in on any short term price pumps. These few investors are probably large holders of ETH/BTC who have done extremely well and are looking to diversify their holdings in promising tokens instead of cashing in to fiat and copping taxation.
It's this reason why I am going to drop 1 ETH into the project and hope for the best. I had to go to BITREX to trade the token and send it back to myself. If you are buying BAT, you will have to add the custom token in your view wallet with the following information:
Address: 0x0D8775F648430679A709E98d2b0Cb6250d2887EF
Code: BAT
Decimals: 18