Hello there! If you're on Publish0x, you've undoubtedly heard of the Basic Attention Token and Brave Browser. Heck, chances are you're using it right now and racking up the rewards! Brave's whole schtick is that it improves your privacy by blocking intrusive third-party advertisements and provides BAT in exchange for viewing its own ads. You can then choose to either automatically or manually tip your favorite creators with these tokens. It's a pretty slick system. However, there are a few aspects that leave me wanting. In this post I'll share some of my suggestions for improving BAT and potentially growing the ecosystem -- helping everyone.

Make Tipping Mean Something

Currently when you tip a creator, Brave will just send along the BAT to them and that's it. It all feels pretty impersonal. When you're essentially giving your money to someone it would be nice if there was a better way of tracking what you've given. Even better, it would be cool if you could optionally say why you tipped and even hear back! Toss a coin to your creators!

Allow Creators To Integrate BAT With Their Platforms

It would be cool if Brave granted content creators the ability to integrate BAT with their platforms. For example, a news site could either plaster their site in ads, except money through PayPal, or accept a monthly BAT subscription. Or maybe a YouTuber or web forum could allow for access to premium content through BAT donations -- kind of like a Patreon model. Or maybe a mobile game developer could accept BAT in exchange for extra content (or even offer BAT for playing!). I feel these kind of integrations would both help BAT grow in popularity among creators and make it more "sticky." Give Brave users a reason to purchase BAT for their wallets.

Create a Brave Rewards Plugin

A lot of folks are hesitant to install an unheard of browser -- after all, think of all the sensitive data we access online! It would be great if Brave Rewards was available as a plugin for another secure and privacy focused browser like Firefox. Brave ads could still be served, malicious content could still be blocked, but people wouldn't have to worry about switching away from the browser they're used to. This is very unlikely to happen, but it could potentially grow the BAT community significantly.

Allow Withdrawal to Exchanges Other than Uphold

This one is also a bit of a long shot. I can understand the desire from Brave to have a KYC adhering exchange as a partner and I'm not asking for them to give that up. However, it would be nice if there were popular alternatives that could be used instead. A lot of personal data goes to exchanges when registering and in the inevitable event of a breach, it would be nice to limit the blast radius a bit. Best way of doing this is by not having to sign up for yet another exchange. Oh well. 🙂

Thanks for listening. Your friend, friend.