Brendan Eich, famous for founding Mozilla and creating JavaScript, has presented Brave, new software that pays in bitcoin for web advertisements.

With Eich's new project, you can receive bitcoin micropayments for browsing and pass them forward to your favourite websites to support them financially even if you choose ad-free viewing. The source code is already in GitHub ready to be tested. The official launch is expected later in 2016.

Although referred to simply as a browser, Brave is in fact a whole new vehicle for advertisement sales or “browser-based ad-tech platform”, as Eich himself calls it. The software allows surfing the web just like Firefox or Chrome. But with one addition: it blocks banners replacing them with 'clean ads' which do not slow down browsing or harm users' privacy. These ads still bring 55% revenue to their publishers and 15% to the advertisers, in bitcoin. But it's not all: Brave owners and users also get 15% of revenue each.

Brave automatically registers bitcoin accounts for publishers and pays the reward onto them. It is up to publishers then to find a way to collect the payments.

Earlier this month CoinFox reported about the release of LetsBrik, a web browser-based communication platform which offers HD video chat, cheap international calls and SMS exchange. The accounts can be topped up in bitcoin as well as in credit and debit cards and via PayPal.

In December 2015 Google Chrome added a new extension Netki which simplifies the use of bitcoin wallets, helping to create neat wallet names instead of lengthy 32-character public addresses.

Sonya Belova