What is Basic Attention Token?

Basic Attention Token (BAT) is an advertising token based on Ethereum’s network. The primary objective of the Basic Attention Token (BAT) is to solve the challenges facing people in the digital advertising space where the privacy of parties involved is not respected.

In other major browsers, users are tracked while going on with their activities on the internet, it is difficult for publishers to also get money out of their content, and those advertising get defrauded now and then.

Taking a look at the current digital advertising space, Facebook and Google receive almost 73% of the revenue collected from digital advertising, and that’s what the Basic Attention Token wants to change.

The Basic Attention Token (BAT) wants to achieve its goals by removing intermediaries from the advertising process.

By removing intermediaries, the Basic Attention Token (BAT) ensures that those that watch advertisements get paid as required and the people publishing adverts get to receive their revenue directly.

This will also allow entities advertising to get better returns on their investments and accurate statistics for analyzing, using the Basic Attention Token (BAT).

How Basic Attention Token works with Brave browser

Brave is an open-source browser and high-performance browser that can block ads trackers.

Investors can install this browser on their devices running on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is important to note that the Brave browser is not the same as the Basic Attention Token (BAT); it only integrates it for better functioning.

Brave combines The Basic Attention Token in the following way;

Brave payments – This is a system that allows web users to give support to content creators that they support.

Brave payments determine what the user contributes while using the Brave browser but the user can also decide to pin an exact amount of contribution that they are willing to give. Those people that opt into Brave payment get to use a unidirectional in-browser BAT wallet, which they can use to send their Basic Attention Token (BAT).

Is Basic Attention Token only applicable to the Brave browser?

Currently, the Basic Attention Token’s platform primary focus is on Brave browser, but it is expected to extend to other platforms such as messaging apps and games. This extension will take place during the Apollo stage of BAT’s roadmap.

Strengths and weaknesses associated with BAT ( Basic Attention Token )

Strengths of BAT

Elimination of intermediaries: With the use of Basic Attention Token, digital advertising costs are lowered, and users get to enjoy their browsing experiences without the spam adverts. Through this system, advertisers and users get to benefit from each other.

This also helps publishers make money from their platforms as there is no middle man who holds a majority of the ad revenue while distributing some of the money to viewers of the ads.

Privacy: By blocking ads and trackers, BAT gets to ensure that the user’s privacy is not infringed. Brave uses the ANONIZE algorithm to keep data collected from users browsing history private.

However, Brave does not create anonymity; it ensures transparency while hiding the identity of the user. It’s this privacy feature that has created a large market for Brave.

Strong Team: The Basic Attention Token (BAT) team comprises of experienced and respectable individuals in the web industry. Brian Bondy who is the founder has worked with Firefox, Evernote and the Khan Academy while Brendan Eich has also worked with JavaScript, Mozilla, and Firefox.

BAT’s partnerships: Basic Attention Token has very strong partnerships with some notable companies like Uphold, a digital money platform, DuckDuckGo, and the Dow Jones Media Group.

Weaknesses of BAT

High competition: The Basic Attention Token (BAT) faces fierce competition from other browsers such as Google Chrome and Facebook that enjoy enormous economies of scale in the advertisement industry.

The two platforms are well known and used by many content creators because of the large number of users they have. Additionally, BAT only allows display ads unlike Google AdSense; hence it is difficult for advertisers to abandon Google and adopt BAT.

Adoption difficulties: The Basic Attention Token also faces a big challenge when it comes to adoption. For BAT to get more people to use its platform, it employs the referral system across other platforms such as YouTube.

Though effective, the referral programs have their downside in that most of the people use the product so that they can earn quick cash by manipulating views. Additionally, referrals bring in a lot of low-quality users who lack the potential to generate good income for advertisers.

BAT, however, intends to stop referral frauds by limiting the number of ads that can be viewed by a single browser, this will make it possible for it to study the interaction between users and content.

BAT’s Wallet: Its wallet is unidirectional which means that the wallet users cannot withdraw any external funds. When making withdrawals, users are forced to use a third-party wallet to change their Basic Attention Token to fiat and vice versa. It is important to note that this is a lengthy and costly process which puts off many users.

Ethereum’s scalability issues: Since BAT is Ethereum-based, it also faces the scalability problems on the Ethereum network. BAT tries to solve the scalability issue by combining several transactions into a single enormous contribution to lower transaction fees and network congestion.

BAT’s price and trading History

Shortly after its ICO, BAT hit its first high value of $0.327, and it later attained its highest market value of $0.864 in August 2018. The Basic Attention coin got a significant boost in 2018 when Coinbase announced that it would be listing BAT as a tradeable asset on their platform.

The launch of the Brave browser has propelled the upward price movement of BAT.

Where to buy Basic Attention Tokens

Investors can buy BAT from exchanges such as Bittrex and Binance by exchanging it with a trading pair such as BTC/BAT and ETH/BAT.

It is also possible to use USD to purchase Basic Attention token (BAT) on Coinbase Pro; it is expected that Coinbase will also make it possible for the same to happen on their platform.

Investors can also receive Basic Attention Tokens by making use of the Brave browser. Early Brave adopters received up to 5 BAT each month.

How to store BAT (Basic Attention Tokens)

Since BAT is an ERC20 token, it is possible to store it with any Ethereum compatible wallet such as MyEtherWallet. If you wish to use a hardware wallet, then it is advisable to use the Ledger Nano S or Trezor wallets.

It is also possible to store BAT on the Brave browser wallet.

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