Brave, the open source web browser based on the Chromium platform, is experiencing an increase in popularity. In August 2018 he made news by being downloaded. 10 million times from the Google Play store. Just seven months later it appears again in the news by doubling that number to 20 million. That is fantastic growth and is being driven by some real innovation.
Get paid to see ads
The biggest individual innovation of the Brave browser is its interruption of the traditional advertising model. While Brave comes pre-installed with adblockers, users can choose to turn them off and, in exchange for viewing ads, they can earn a reward.
The reward is paid in the cryptocurrency BAT (basic care token) and deposited in a wallet integrated in the browser. Brave’s CEO, Brendan Eich, has projected that “I would not be surprised if our users can earn $ 70 / year by uploading the system in 2019, when it will be more difficult to get advertising agreements and subsidize the revenues from the Grupo de crecimiento de BAT users, and rise by 2020 to more than $ 224 of net user income per year. ”
It is possible that $ 70 per year is not much, but if the projection is accurate and a user in 2020 can earn $ 224, that starts to become a significant amount of money. With new improvements, that number could grow and, in doing so, it is difficult not to see an influx of users downloading the Brave browser.
Community support
Recently, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, nodded to Brave during his speech at TOKEN2049.
“Actually, there are many things in the ecosystem that have encouraged me a lot recently, particularly, especially in the last six months, it feels like things are starting to do things that are really useful for a much wider audience. Interestingly, we have seen the incorporation of large-scale users, so browsers, Brave, have some built-in cryptocurrency features. ”
In the cryptocurrency ecosystem, where adoption is a key issue, Brave with his BAT token is showing that it is possible for people to be interested and use cryptocurrency. The price of BAT has increased 180% in the last two months and only continues to rise.
However, this price increase is not only correlated with the browser. Recently, the TAP advertising platform announced that they would begin accepting BAT in more than 250,000 of their brand partners. That will make it easier to spend BAT in different popular locations.
As long as this trend continues and the Brave browser continues to download, it seems that BAT may be one of the signals that lead the way towards the adoption of large-scale cryptocurrencies.
Also published on Medium.