Brave Software, founded on May 28th, 2015 by Brendan Eich (CEO) and Brian Bondy (CTO), is responsible for the Brave Browser which is currently available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and iOS operating systems. In the battle against centralization, one we have become very familiar in the greater crypto space, Brave has developed itself to take a stand agains the multibillion dollar centralized entities that hinder privacy and collect personal information, histories, and more, in order to increase profit in much the way that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have become known for their fight agains the centralized financial institutions of the present day. “Brave is on a mission to fix the web by giving users a safer, faster and better browsing experience while growing support for content creators through a new attention-based ecosystem of rewards.” (https://brave.com/about/).

In addition to protecting users security from prying eyes, Brave browser also boasts faster website loading times and reduced service fees by internet providers due to its utilization of built in add blocking. This is possible due to the nature of Brave blocking pop up adds which both speeds up site page loading times reducing the cost of time needed to spend online significantly.

Larry Sanger, Co-founder of Wikepedia and Everipedia Chief Information Officer, sums up the issues faced within the current system and the benefits of Brave quite well in the following quote taken from a January 4th, 2019 article entitled How I’m Locking Down My Cyber Life on on his personal homepage larrysanger.org:

“Google collects massive amounts of information from us via their browser. The good news is that you don’t have to use it, if you’re among the 62% of people who do. I’ve been using Firefox; but I haven’t been happy about that. The Mozilla organization, which manages the browser, is evidently dominated by the Silicon Valley left; they forced out Brendan Eich, one of the creators of Firefox and the JavaScript programming language, for his political views. Frankly, I don’t trust them. I’ve switched to Eich’s newer, privacy-focused browser, Brave. I’ve had a much better experience using it lately than I had when I first tried it a year or two ago and when it was still on the bleeding edge. Brave automatically blocks ads, trackers, third-party cookies, encrypts your connections—and, unlike Google, they don’t have a profile about you (well, it never leaves your machine; the Brave company doesn’t have access to it). As a browser, it’s quite good and a pleasure to use. It also pays you in crypto for using it. There might be a few rare issues (maybe connected with JavaScript), but when I suspect there’s a problem with the browser, I try whatever I’m trying to do in a locked-down version of Firefox, which is now my fallback. There’s absolutely no need to use Chrome for anything but testing, and that’s only if you’re in Web development. By the way, the Brave iOS app is really nice, too.”

For more information on the specifics of what other advantages Brave offers it’s users (as well as for the source of the above image), please visit https://brave.com/features/

The Brave browser is essentially powered by the Basic Attention Token, or BAT for short. BAT is an open sourced decentralized Ethereum based ad exchange platform. The token is billed as a solution to problems which plague digital advertising and helps to mitigate a market saturated by middlemen, online activity tracking, and cases of internet fraud.

“Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain. The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the BAT platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.”

Source: basicattentiontoken.org

Together, Brave and BAT are looking to revolutionize online content creation in a positive way for just about everyone involved. Utilizing the Brave browser protects users personal information and saves them both time and money by turning mass unhindered advertising into an opt in system. Through the BAT token, these users can then reward their favorite content creators on the web directly allowing content creators and publishers to get paid for their services by those who appreciate their efforts. In addition, advertisers actually pay users directly in BAT instead of spamming every page that visits a site with costly adds and annoys users that may not be interested in viewing then or want to pay the time or cost to load or watch them. Essentially, through collaboration of the Brave and BAT system, online users, content creators, and advertisers can all streamline and optimize their web based browsing experiences for efficiency enabling better resource management and user experience benefiting everyone participating within the framework of the system.

Although I must confess that it took me a little time to get used to the change over from my previous browser, once I began to get the hang of navigating Brave and interacting with the BAT payment portion of the project, it has at this point become my go to browser on both computer and mobile. Design wise it is really slick and the homepage offers almost a desktop like feel to it. Add to that the fact that setup was not that difficult as all bookmarks and many settings can be imported from chrome to get users started without having to spend time bookmarking frequently used sites. This is especially useful for someone in the blockchain space that may have bookmarked various exchanges and sites as a precaution to scammers or malicious phishing sites. Even though there are still a few kinks and bugs, updates seem to happen relatively frequently and the user experience seems exponentially greater with each one. From a tokenomics perspective, BAT is very promising as it is one of the few at this early stage that actually has a strong and valid use case giving it value beyond a lot of projects out there that are still in early development with only a concept or idea of what they plan to do. Although it’s early days for cryptocurrencies not to mention the Brave and BAT project in particular, this project looks unlikely to fail as it seems to be gaining a lot of attention from general users, content creators, and progressive advertisers alike. I believe that the Brave browsing experience powered through the BAT tokenomics model will be a real game changer as it forges its way through the present enabling a better online experience for and global standard by which future generations will measure all else by. It is for this reason that I have no choice but to include this project into my list of ‘Top 10 Best Crypto DApps’.

For those of you that may have yet to try out the Brave browser and interact with the BAT token, I strongly suggest you give it a try. I can almost guarantee that it is an experience that if you take little time necessary to get you on your way, you will not regret. I’m hoping at some point to give a more comprehensive breakdown of how to navigate the various features of Brave which I intentionally omitted here as this articles purpose was more of an introduction on promising present dApps in the space. As for this post then, that about wraps it up but, not without a giant thank you dropping on in and keeping in touch with my thoughts. Until that time again then when we revisit the next installment in the ‘Top 10 Best Crypto dApps’ series, do enjoy all that life has to offer in crypto and beyond.

Your Trybalist in creative arms, Jimmy D

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Personal Disclaimer: In no manner what-so-ever does this post represent financial advice. Nor has this post been paid for by any of the companies or parties associated with these products. This is merely a project that I find worth writing about and wished to share with the broader community as part of the Trybe.oneTop 10 Crypto DApp Review Content Competition and published previously on the TRYBE.ONE platform. I am not a financial advisor and although I appreciate the people who stop in and give my content a read, it is the readers responsibility to do their own research on projects before they decide to support or invest in them.

Jimmy D is a verified member of CryptoPilots, a community devoted to Quality Content in Crypto. Find me also on TRYBE.ONE, Minds.com, PublishOx, Twitter, Jimmy D Presents Facebook Group, and Murmur (kansaikrypto).