It’s already been nearly 6 months since my last post on the key happenings in the BAT/Brave ecosystem and many more things have happened since then.

Brave has now hit nearly 350,000 verified publishers, surpassed 10 million active monthly users, and has reached 50 million downloads on Android.

So, to keep you up-to-date on this fast, growing, and evolving ecosystem, I decided to sum up all the exciting stuff that happened in the BAT & Brave ecosystem in 2019.

January 4, 2019 - Wikipedia Co-Founder publicly admits he switched to Brave

In yet another public announcement from a prominent figure, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announced that he had stopped using the Google Chrome browser in favor of the privacy-focused Brave browser.

Sanger’s switch to the Brave browser was made in an effort to “lockdown his cyber life” in the hopes to prevent further privacy threats against him.

As stated in Sanger’s blog post, he made the switch to Brave after learning that his own phone was hacked due to his Google ID password being changed without his knowledge.

With Brave’s privacy-first approach, Sanger feels more comfortable browsing the web as all trackers, invasive ads, device fingerprinting, phishing, malware, and malvertising are natively blocked.

February 6, 2019 - Basic Attention Token Exposed to 38M Coinbase Users

In yet another effort to spread awareness and increase Brave’s adoption, Brave Software partnered with Coinbase Earn to offer educational content on Basic Attention Token (BAT) and the Brave browser.

Coinbase Earn users can now view and complete educational tasks about BAT and Brave and earn BAT tokens for doing so. $5 million, denominated in BAT, is allocated to this program and 100% of the tokens go directly to the users.

August 1, 2019 - Twitter Tipping With Brave

While Brave is already amazing with its fast, secure, and privacy-preserving browsing experience, it goes above and beyond with its Brave Rewards feature which allows users to tip their favorite websites and content creators.

Expanding on this feature, Brave enabled its users to tip individual content creators on Twitter with Basic Attention Token (BAT).

As seen in the image above, when a user visits Twitter using the Brave desktop browser and have Brave Rewards enabled, they will see a new “Tip” button on each tweet. Users choose the amount they would like to tip and BAT gets sent directly to the author of the tweet.

This Brave Rewards implementation on Twitter is just the beginning and I’m sure we can expect to see many more implementations like this in the future.

August 27, 2019 - Wikipedia Became a Verified Brave Publisher

Wikipedia – the 7th largest website on the planet – became an officially verified publisher on the Brave platform last year, marking an extremely important feat in Brave’s adoption.

Becoming a verified Brave publisher is such a natural move for Wikipedia seeing as the website operates on a donations only based revenue model. Now Wikipedia can add to its revenue model by receiving donations and tips in BAT from Brave users.

Wikipedia now joins the likes of The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vimeo, and DuckDuckGo in joining the 40,100+ verified websites on Brave.

October 2, 2019 - Brave Releases Its Research Decentralized VPN (dVPN) Implementation

While Brave is arguably already the best and most innovative privacy-preserving browser available, the Brave team is not done with their innovations just yet.

In October 2019, the Brave team released plans for an implementation of a distributed Virtual Private Network (VPN) called VPN0.

This is yet another important and revolutionary development for Brave as this kind of distributed VPN can bring user privacy to new heights in which centralized VPNs cannot achieve.

However, historically there have been many challenges and risks associated with dVPNs, namely performance, privacy guarantees, and traffic accountability.

These are the challenges in which the Brave team is tackling and believe they can overcome. If so, Brave’s dVPN will be unlike anything we’ve come across before and will further increase awareness and adoption of the Brave browser and BAT tokens.

November 13, 2019 - Brave 1.0 Was Launched

On November 13, 2019, Brave Software came out of beta and launched its first iteration of the fully complete cross-platform Brave browser, marking it a historic feat for BAT & Brave.

Brave 1.0 offers users a private, safer, and 3-6x faster-browsing experience coupled with an innovative blockchain-based digital advertising platform powered by Basic Attention Token (BAT).

With the launch of Brave 1.0, users gained access to a full set of unique features, including:

Brave Rewards

Using BAT & Brave’s innovative attention-based advertising platform, users can now support their favorite publishers and content creators by activating Brave Rewards and sending them BAT as tips.

Users can directly tip their favorite publishers or simply tip by defaulting to recurring monthly payments.

Brave Ads

With Brave’s pioneered blockchain-based advertising model, Brave users are rewarded for their attention towards opt-in ads with a 70 percent revenue share in the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT).

Brave Shields

Brave takes a privacy-first approach by natively blocking trackers, invasive ads, device fingerprinting, phishing, malware, and malvertising.

In doing this, Brave not only preserves its user’s privacy and ensures their security, but also provides a faster browsing experience by up to 3 to 6 times.

“Brave 1.0 is the browser reimagined, transforming the Web to put users first with a private, browser-based ads and payment platform. With Brave, the Web can be a rewarding experience for all, without users paying with their privacy.” – Brendan Eich, co-founder and CEO of Brave Software

November 18, 2019 - Director of AI at Tesla publicly compliments Brave & BAT

Brave has attracted the attention of some very prominent individuals such as Andrej Karpathy, Director of AI at Tesla, who publicly tweeted out that he’s using Brave browser to improve his internet hygiene:

Karpathy has nearly 250K followers on Twitter so the tweet above spreads very positive awareness to quite a large audience.

December 3, 2019 - Brave Donated its whole Ads inventory to Causes and Nonprofits

As a part of #GivingTuesday on December 3, 2019 (the world’s largest traditional day of giving), Brave donated its entire Ads inventory revenue for that day to charities and nonprofits.

The donations were made through a partnership with The Giving Block – a company that enables people to donate cryptocurrency to 100+ charities and nonprofits.

Additionally, The Giving Block donated all of the BAT tipped through their site to the charities and nonprofits participating in their #BitcoinTuesday initiative.

This day was just one example of how Brave and its Brave Rewards system can do good and inspire people to do good in the world.

December 5, 2019 - Passing 10 Million Monthly Active Users

Since the release of Brave 1.0 in November 2019, the browser has experienced a surge in user adoption.

Brave went from 8.7 million monthly active users in October to 10.4 million monthly active users by the end of November. That’s a 19% increase across all platforms and represents a doubling of Brave’s monthly active users in just 1 year.

What’s more impressive is that Brave’s daily active users tripled in 2019, reaching 3.3 million.

If Brave adoption keeps up this pace, the competition between Brave and Chrome will heat up big time.

December 31, 2019 - Surpassing 350k Publishers

5 months ago Brave reached a quarter-million (250K) verified publishers and now the platform has already surpassed 350K publishers. This shows that Brave is growing at an unprecedented rate of 20K+ new verified publishers per month.

Contributing to Brave’s accelerated growth is primarily content creators with more than 230K YouTube publishers, 21.7K Twitch publishers, 41.4K Twitter publishers, 16.6K Reddit publishers, 2.6K Vimeo publishers, and 7.5K GitHub publishers.

Additionally, the number of verified website publishers is on the rise as well with over 40K publishers, up nearly 10K from 5 months ago.

Conclusion

2019 sure was an exciting year for Brave and BAT. They have both accomplished so much this year and I’m sure I’ve missed a few other important events such as the uncovering of google's gdpr workaround and others.

So, if you know of something important that I’ve missed, let me know in the comment section below and I’ll add it to the list.

With that said, I can’t wait for things to come in 2020. So far, it looks like it’s going to be a good year for crypto and with all of the growth and adoption Brave and BAT have experienced, I think we’ll finally begin to see BAT’s price mirror its success.

Let’s end off with cheers to 2019 and an eventful 2020!