In January, we announced that we’d distribute $1 million worth of promotional BAT (Basic Attention Token) via user grants to Brave desktop browser wallets — ultimately to be contributed to website publishers and YouTube creators via Brave Payments.

Today we allocated that $1 million worth of BAT to a total of 52,829 website publishers and YouTube creators. If you operate a website or YouTube channel, you can go to https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org and claim your BAT if it was awarded to you. Even if you haven’t previously registered, any BAT you earned will be waiting to be claimed, once you verify ownership of your site or YouTube channel. There are currently over 11,000 verified Brave publishers and creators, so we’re happy to see this program reward sites well beyond our current ecosystem, as Brave users take advantage of the ease-of-use of Brave Payments.

We applied a multi-step process designed to help detect and filter out fraudulent claims of our BAT grants. Also, given the much larger scale at which this promotion ran (compared to our original $50,000 December promotion), various bugs and edge cases surfaced that incorrectly pushed back contribution dates, or in some cases resulted in other unexpected contribution reporting issues.

While such issues are to be expected when bringing up a platform such as BAT, we’re already working to address these as we refine Brave Payments. As we scale up, we are making improvements along every dimension of the system, both to improve reliability and to make actual behavior match expected behavior, all while ensuring our commitment to privacy.

We’re thrilled to see the BAT platform at use to reward favorite sites and creators, and to reconnect publishers with their audience. We look forward to seeing all the rewarded recipients claim the $1M worth of BAT so they can keep creating more content. We’ll have more grants of this nature from our user growth pool in the future to help reward creators for their content and to improve everyone’s web experience, as BAT’s utility increases.