From reaching the 250K verified publisher's milestones to highlighting loopholes in Googles GDPRs compliance - the entire Brave ecosystem has seen a wide range of interesting events over the past month or two.

Here are 6 interesting happenings in the Brave-sphere that you may have missed for you to get up-to-date!

Brave Browser Reaches #1 Android Browser Application In Japan

This month has seen the Brave Browser pull ahead of major competition in the Japanese Android market. As seen in the screenshot below, we can see that Brave is now the number 1 browser application as it sits comfortably in the top 10 ranked applications overall.

We can see that, at the time of the screenshot, Brave was sitting in the 9th position with over 2 million downloads over the past month. Its closest rival was Firefox which currently sits in the 15th position with only 553,000 recent downloads. Brave is now up by a total of 11 spots from last month and is increasing at an alarming rate.

For comparison, Google Chrome is far behind in the Japanese Android market as it sits around the 49th position. Brave is now officially the fastest-growing browser for Android users in Japan according to these staggering statistics.





Wikipedia Becomes A Verified Publisher

This past month we have seen Wikipedia becoming an officially verified publisher on the Brave platform. This is an extremely important publisher considering the fact that Wikipedia is the 7th largest website on the planet!

This now opens the doors for Wikipedia to accept donations and tips in BAT if the user is browsing Wikipedia on the Brave Browser. Considering that Wikipedia operates on donations only based revenue model, this will be an interesting experiment to see if crypto-based payments will make an impact on their revenue stream. If this does make an impact on the revenue for Wikipedia, we can certainly expect other large websites starting to join the ecosystem.

Wikipedia now joins the likes of Vimeo, xHamster, DuckDuckGo, Gamepedia, and Chess.com in joining the 31,500+ verified websites on Brave.

Intel Ads Showing Up To American Users

Another interesting development seen this month is the introduction of Intel Adverts into the Brave advertising system. This was noticed by Reddit user SleepShadow, who had posted the following image;

The image shows a screenshot of one of Brave’s OS Push notifications for advertising on what seems to be the Windows Operating System. The entire idea of Brave is to revolutionize the digital advertising space meaning that advert viewers can also get a piece of the action. The user who posted the image has signed up to the Brave Rewards scheme and has allowed Brave to push adverts directly to him. The user gets to enjoy ads that are closer to his tastes as well as getting a small cut for viewing the advert through Brave Rewards.

This sent a wave of speculation through the Reddit thread as users suggested that the power of brave was getting stronger as they were able to bring in a large company for advertising. If they were able to introduce Intel into the ecosystem, there must be more on the way!

The speculation was soon cleared up by a BAT team member, lukemulks, who had confirmed that this is a campaign ran directly by Intel themselves. This means that Brave did not seek directly out to Intel for advertising services and instead, Intel decided to advertise on the Brave platform on their own decision.

This is great news for the Brave ecosystem as it does show that there is room for the bigger companies to come and start to push advertisements to Brave browser users.

250K Verified Publishers

The Brave-sphere can officially celebrate after reaching a quarter-million verified publishers on their platform. This is a great milestone for Brave as there are now 250,000 content creators all willing to accept donations through the Brave ecosystem - which is growing at an alarming rate!

This statistic was officially posted by the legendary Brave founder, Brendan Eich, himself. The tweet also highlighted that the only other chart to reach 250K on-boarded publishers in under 2 years was the iOS Store!

We hit the milestone at the start of September and now there are over 263,000 verified publishers overall with over 186,000 YouTube publishers and 23,000 Twitter publishers, all producing content on the Brave-sphere!

Kraken

BAT has also officially been added to one of the largest US-Based cryptocurrency exchanges, Kraken! This is fantastic news as it shows that BAT still has the pull to be added to an exchange in a region where policies are known to be difficult for today’s projects. Due to regulation and compliance, many exchanges are delisting many cryptocurrencies within the US for fear of incoming regulation. It is great for BAT to be able to get added to Kraken in a climate such as today.

BAT was added alongside WAVES and is now officially live for trading on Kraken.

Google vs Brave

This is perhaps the juiciest recent news to come out of the Brave ecosystem recently. This month, Brave had announced that Google was under investigation to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) - the official GDPR regulating body for Google after Google made the choice to move its European HQ to Ireland.

Brave's Chief Policy & Industry Relations Office, Dr. Johnny Ryan, had reported Google to the regulating body with evidence that suggests that Google is attempting to circumvent the GDPR laws.

The evidence is concerned with Googles Double Click/Automated Buyer's real-time bidding (RTB) system that they have in place for advertising which is already active on over 8.4 million pages. To cut the long story short, Brave had identified that Google was allowing their 3rd party advertising partners to match identifies for data suggests which would allow them to identify specific personal information about a user and effectively remove their anonymity.

Furthermore, Brave has also identified a tool used by Google known as “Push Pages”. These Push Pages actually invites 3rd party companies to share profile identifiers about a person when they load a web page.

In a response made to Tom’s Hardware, Google had the following to say;

"We do not serve personalized ads or send bid requests to bidders without user consent. The Irish DPC -- as Google's lead DPA -- and the UK ICO are already looking into real time bidding in order to assess its compliance with GDPR. We welcome that work and are co-operating in full."

So there you have it! The price maybe a little bit stagnant but things are certainly bubbling within the Brave ecosystem! There is lot’s going on!