Yesterday, Brave CEO Brendan Eich posted a comment on Hacker News in which he indicated that Brave users may earn substantial rewards for viewing ads. Eich stated that he “would not be surprised if our users can make $70/year as we bring the system up in 2019.”

Eich made this comment in response to a post about Google’s Funding Choices program, which offers advertising options that are compliant with GDPR regulations. Incidentally, Brave recently filed a complaint on this topic, claiming that Google’s advertising practices reveal sensitive user data.

The Brave browser has become famous for combating advertising corruption with its opt-in ad model, which compensates users with its native BAT token. However, some in the cryptocurrency community have expressed doubt that Brave’s offerings will benefit users much more than a simple ad blocker would. As one commenter on Hacker News stated:

“Given that the individual take from this would be minuscule, what’s the advantage over an ad blocker? This sounds like a lot of faux-currency nonsense for little reward (client side at least) to fix a problem that already has a working solution.”

In response to this comment, Eich estimated that users would in fact earn non-trivial amounts. Although he predicts users will make $70 by 2019, Eich also predicted that BAT’s value would climb even higher and that by 2020 net user revenue would reach $320 per year.

Additionally, Eich suggested that there will soon be more competition between advertisers for Brave ad deals, then noted that revenue will be subsidized from the BAT User Growth Pool. These developments will likely increase rewards.

He also distinguished Brave’s eventual user base from its current cast of “lead users.” Eich noted that, presently, many users are researchers and institutions such as Eric Von Hippel and MIT. According to Eich, these users “block [ads] assiduously” and “are worth much more” than other users. Presumably, this distorts reward values and amounts.

Brave is still in development, but new user trials are continuously being launched. Eich offered invites to some of the commenters and noted that Brave is giving BAT grants to users of the desktop browser. Eich also acknowledged that a final product with real rewards is imminent: “[The] system should be available in Brave 1.0 in a couple of months,” according to Eich.