by Brendan Eich

Foreword

I co-founded Mozilla and wrote its technology roadmaps back when we were rebooting the Netscape-contributed browser code via open source. Here’s the first one. This one from 2003, by David Hyatt and me, charted the direct course to Firefox.

These documents set direction and listed goals and requirements. Equally important, they renounced non-goals and listed what was off the agenda. For the BAT platform, any tracking or targeting from remote ad servers or exchanges is excluded by construction.

The map is not the terrain, so each roadmap ages past a point of usefulness and becomes a relic. I expect the same to happen with the BAT project’s roadmaps. This roadmap is likely to cover the next year to 18 months.

Approach

The BAT sale provides the development team with enough resources to complete the platform work we started last fall using bitcoin in the “Brave Payments [beta]” experimental automated micro-donation system already in Brave. We intend to use the funds as follows:

Recruit and retain Ethereum, machine learning, devops, project management, ad sales, UX design, and more browser development people, to build out the BAT platform in the stages outlined below. As the BAT platform develops and gets integrated with Brave, evangelize other attention-economy apps, from browsers to games and beyond, to join an organization we will endow to promote user-first, private, and anonymous ads, donations, micro-paywall-piercing “link gifting”, and other token-based premium products, and share the BAT among apps other than Brave. We aim to make this a non-profit. Create a source of seed funding, with exact structure to be determined, to sponsor entrepreneurs to create new BAT apps. This may take the form of an independently judged prize system in which apps must follow the endpoint software rules and on-chain smart contracts prototyped by the development team (1) and codified by the member organization (2). Fund greater user growth of Brave and other BAT apps by rewarding users who choose to opt into the BAT platform, to get to greater scale sooner with the brands and agencies buying user-private ad slots, and (where publishers partner with us) ad slots on pages. Growth requires promotion and distribution above organic rate and scale, so we will fund it with some of the sale proceeds.

The BAT platform work must be staged to fit modern “agile”/non-waterfall software development methods. In particular, it must fit Brave’s six-week chromium update cycle and the finer-grained milestone release structure that we use to manage scope creep and increase predictability.

The program of work outlined in this roadmap uses code-names borrowed from the U.S. Space Program. Reforming the attention economy of ad-tech and payments may not be rocket science, but it is still ambitious. We need to manage scope creep at a larger scale than the Brave development cadence.

Schedule

BAT Mercury (summer 2017)