Looking Into The Basic Attention Token (2021)
Introduction to one of the most promising and actively used crypto utility tokens.
In this post, we’ll take a look at:
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) crypto token is a utility token for rewarding Brave browser users for seeing online ads while respecting their privacy. Unlike other crypto tokens BAT is being used actively by millions of users. This posts takes a deeper look at BAT and answers the most important questions.
What Is the Brave Browser?
To understand BAT we have to first look into the Brave browser. The Brave Browser is build on the same technical foundation as Google Chrome. However it differentiates itself from Google Chrome by putting a strong focus on protecting a user’s privacy.
It does that by given the user full control over what trackers, scripts and ads are allowed to run on any specific website. This not only results in enhanced privacy for the user but also in significant page speed improvements and reduced data usage.
Who Is Behind the Brave Browser?
The Brave browser was founded by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy. Mr Eich is most well know for having invented JavaScript which is a fundamental building blog of the internet and one of the most used programming languages. He was also CEO of the Mozilla Corporation which develops the Firefox browser.
How Does BAT Work?
With BAT web users, advertisers and content creators can all benefit from each other. It improves the efficiency of digital advertising as it creates a new unit of exchange between them.
It starts with advertisers who can use the Brave browser to reach its users with their ads. Unlike other online ads the Brave ads are targeted using a locally running machine learning algorithm. It find matching ads based on the users behavior without having to share any user data. As a result the users privacy is being maintained while still serving matching ads.
Advertisers can choose between multiple different ad formats:
- Sponsored images which are being shown to users when opening a new browser tab.
- Web push notifications which are being send randomly to Brave users.
Once a user sees an ad he or she is being rewarded by receiving 70% of the ad revenue in the form of BAT. They can then decided wether they want to share some or all of their earned BAT with content creators on a monthly basis. If they decide to do so the total amount is divided by the attention a content creator‘s site received and paid out to the creator. The attention is tallied in a privacy respecting way by the Brave browser.
Technical Foundation
BAT is based on the ERC20 token standard and runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The standard is being used by smart contract and provides a list of rules that all Ethereum-based tokens have to follow.
Total Amount of BAT in Circulation
During an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017 a total amount of 1 billion BAT was being sold to investors. In addition a total amount of 500 million BAT was retained by the Brave browser team. This amount is split into a development team pool with 200 million BAT and a user growth pool with 300 million BAT. The total value of the ICO was equivalent to 156,250 ETH.
Since the total amount of BAT is currently fixed to 1.5 billion BAT it cannot currently be mined. It can however be traded on some crypto exchanges, like Coinbase. The Brave team however hasn’t intended that BAT is being used as a traded asset.
Future Outlook
The BAT utility token is probably one of the most promising ones currently out there. While many projects have yet to gain any significant usage BAT stands out because of its active usage by millions of Brave browsers users. As of April 2021 Brave has already signed up over 1 million creators and sees over 25 million monthly active users using BAT.
Advertising giants like Google and Facebook are being increasingly scrutinized and user privacy is shifting more and more in the the focus of the public. With that in mind BAT has a high chance to succeed in replacing the existing online advertisement systems while benefiting everyone involved in the process. It for sure is a crypto project worth watching.
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