Basic Attention Token (BAT) is one of the most controversial and also one of the most ambitious and praise-worthy projects in the current cryptosphere.

Created back in 2016, the Basic Attention Token has one of the biggest names behind it, that of Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and the legendary co-founder of Mozilla. Other noteworthy team members include Brian Bondy, lead developer and co-founder of Brave and Scott Locklin, senior engineer, and co-founder of Kerf Software.

What is Basic Attention Token?

To put it as simple as possible, Basic Attention Token is the native token that powers the Brave ecosystem. BAT is an ERC-20 token, which means that it’s built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens can be used freely on the Brave ecosystem meaning that they can be exchanged between advertisers, publishers, and typical Internet users.

The main goal of the San Francisco-based Basic Attention Token (BAT) project is to provide its users with a powerful digital advertising exchange based on blockchain technologies. It was designed to address and improve the somewhat unfair digital advertising system where many Internet users are required to sacrifice time, privacy and attention in order to use it for free.

The project’s structure, how BAT works

If the aforementioned name of Brave sounds familiar, it’s because Brave is arguably one of the best browsers to have come up in recent years. Brave is a Chromium-based web browser that’s all about offering its users a grander online experience by blocking trackers and ads, thus, improving both privacy and webpage loading speeds.

The Brave browser is an instrumental part of the Basic Attention Token project. Of course, users are not required to necessarily use BAT when using Brave even though they can use the token to pay content publishers.

Since the project is basically developing a new type of digital advertising model, it inevitably goes head to head with some of the biggest advertising giants out there such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The new system that BAT proposes pushes out middlemen companies such as those mentioned above. Instead of paying them, the currency can be paid directly from advertisers to users using BAT. Simply put, its advertising model allows advertisers to pay for ads using BAT and users viewing those adds will be rewarded with BAT.

According to the Basic Attention Token whitepaper, Brave has a special role to play as it is used to measure the attention of the users. The browser analyses user engagement with a specific tab and displays relevant ads based on the time spent scrolling over specific content.

Once the attention score is collected, the data is sent to the Brave ledger system. It is responsible for paying the publishers and users alike based on the final attention score.

Market performance

The BAT token has been launched via a typical ICO. What’s most impressive about this particular ICO is the fact that the company managed to raise $35 million in just under 30 seconds. As of this writing, BAT is priced at $0.23 per token, not a lot more than when it was first launched back in June 2017 ($0.17).

The total market capitalization of BAT is $237,735,000 with a circulating supply of 100,000,000 BAT out of a total supply of 1,500,000,000 BAT. The coin is currently ranked 51 on CoinMarketCap, and it can be traded on some of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges out there such as Binance, LATOKEN, Huobi, ChaoEX, Bittrex, and VeBitcoin. For more information, refer to CoinMarketCap’s Markets section.

Storing BAT

Since the BAT token is an ERC-20 token, it can be stored on any Ethereum-compatible wallet. Some of the best wallets for storing BAT are Ledger Nano S, MyEtherWallet, and Exodus.

Future investment

There are many who believe that BAT is a very good long-term investment. The basic principle behind the project is the main selling point, the team is comprised out of many brilliant minds, and the Brave browser is currently used as a kickstarter for improving the scaling of the project by offering free tokens to anyone using it.

The future is not going to be an easy one for BAT, mostly because the project faces very stiff competition from other advertising giants such as Google and Facebook as well as from other similar blockchain-based advertising platforms such as Papyrus and Adshares. Fortunately, the latter two are mostly focused on publishers and advertisers, excluding users completely, a thing that makes BAT that much more valuable. Future investors should proceed with caution and do comprehensive research before committing. Checking out the project’s roadmap is also be a very good idea.

Social media

For more information about the project, users are advised to visit the project’s official website. Other useful resources include the blog section, the project’s Medium section, its Reddit, as well as its Twitter and Telegram channels.

Conclusion

According to the project’s whitepaper, besides all the involved costs in data charges for loading ads, the device’s performances can be affected as well. It’s believed that advertisements can decrease the battery life of your phone or laptop by as much as 21%. However, the most valuable resource users lose because of ads is their free time.

It will be interesting to see how the future will look for both the Basic Attention Token and the Brave browser. Even though the token-based ecosystem and its ad-blocking browser are both great propositions, the project still requires greater adoption rates until it can confidently look towards a profitable future. Only time will tell if Basic Attention Token will manage to revolutionize the digital advertising industry.