BAT Continues to Evolve and Engage Communities

One of the first cryptocurrencies that I started to diversify into was the Basic Attention Token (BAT) last year as it was on a shortlist of projects that, like Steem, had a working product that did a good job in performing its intended purpose. After exploring the project by using the Brave Browser for some time, I thought that it would be worth my investment as a long term value creation ecosystem as communities continues towards improving their privacy and performance when browsing the internet.

What easily convinced me was to experience the effectiveness of the Brave Browser while doing my typical research and exploring news in general. While I have been hesitant to use for financial transactions, I have started to slowly use in more and more for daily use as well. Also, all of my Steem related activities are now mostly done on the browser given the great Steem KeyChain Wallet extension working great in the browser as well. When comparing performance, websites load so much quicker and expend much less data when compared to others. It is actually scary to see the amount of ads and trackers that the browser blocks as it gives perspective as to what go on when normally browsing on others.

The development team has continued to deliver with their roadmap with continued deployments of updates for the application. It remains as one of the most used Dapps and ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum Network and its user base continues to grow. Recently, they have finally deployed their Ad Rewards program to users after months with only their tipping programs. While the tipping program was not broadly successful, they have looked towards ways of getting more activity done with it. It highly depends on content creators signing up for the ability to receive tips but it is seemingly expanding as more realize the potential and cryptocurrencies in general continue to gain interest.

For the first couple of months, I had a hard time finding content creators to support and providing tips which grew my wallet size. However, as I expanded the usage of the browser, I have been able to see more users accepting it. I think it is a great model to follow as it takes our self interest out of the equation as a pure curation model. I think it will ultimately create value across a broad community to compete with many other content creation efforts. I am still looking for great content to support so let me know if you know a couple!

Now I have expanded into the Ad Rewards program which is more actively depend on our activities. While we still cannot consume the BAT we earn, it is still a great way to curate and accumulate to spread value across the ecosystem. Ads come up optional a couple of times an hour and while they provide small amounts, it is not bad for a click and a browse of what they offer. In fact, there have been a couple of interesting offers that have gotten my interest, including the site to the BAT community to understand how they are leveraging the protocol and browser technology.

Another recent addition has been that tips have been added to some key content websites and platforms like Twitter and Twitch. While I have yet to give it a try, the ability to send tips when browsing these platforms is a great way to increase interest and potential bring more influencers into the community. They will hold there tips for a predetermined amount of time while the content creator signs up which also provides and incentive for them to do so. I even signed up as a creator and have linked some accounts although I am not sure if we can linked our Steem accounts yet.

There is still plenty of opportunities that remain for the project and the technology behind BAT which has maintained my interest in not only the tool and product but also the token as it continues grow and find great use cases for the environment we see growing in the future as privacy and blockchain become valuable and important. I am also hoping that other projects leveraging similar technologies and communities continue to integrate with BAT such as Steem and others. We need to ensure that ours efforts here on Steem are leveraged for this project as well. I haven’t heard of it being worked on for Steem content creators but let me know if you have!