So let’s look at how Brave is going to bravely change the way we browse the Internet.

People that browse the web with Chrome, Safari, Edge or any other browser generally fall into two categories:

1. People that download an extension that tries to block Internet adverts.

2. People that don’t know any better

Neither situation is ideal.

But what if we told you there was a third and fourth category?

3. People that use Brave Browser, allowing them to natively opt-out of intrusive advertisements

4. People that use Brave Browser and get rewarded just by seeing ads.

You can literally save time and money by not consuming advertisements – thanks to BAT and Brave.

BAT stands for Basic Attention Token. Its goal is to radically improve the efficiency of digital advertising using the power of the Ethereum blockchain. It does this through the Brave platform, allowing publishers and users to trade advertising and attention-based services.

Brave is BAT’s partner in crime. It is a modern, super-fast and open source browser that blocks malvertisements and privacy infiltrating trackers. Most importantly, it houses an anonymous ledger system that rewards both publishers and content consumers. There is no middleman to track, store and sell your private data with this model.

But BAT stands for much more than just awarding consumers for looking at ads.

We all know that ads and trackers contribute to longer loading times and higher data usage – but the extent to how detrimental ads and trackers can be is often forgotten by the end user. Currently, even up to 50% of page loading time is caused by the ads, trackers and cookies with purpose of learning more about your habits, your browsing history and you as a person.

That doesn’t sound like privacy to us. What we find even scarier though, is the effect on data usage: as claimed by Business Intelligence[2], one study found that up to 79% of mobile data on major publishing sites is coming from ads and trackers. When you consider that most of the world is not on infinite mobile data plans, this is significant.

Most of us have a rough imagination that trackers and adverts consume some amount of the loading time and the bandwidth but we don’t fully realise just how much it really is. As stated in BAT’s white paper, mobile advertising results in as much as 21% battery life and $23 (!) per month in data charges on average.

The calculation is as follows: a typical smartphone user consumes 1.8 GB data a month. Based on the carrier plans for 2 GB, this means that average users end up paying up to $23 a month just to download ads, trackers, scripts etc.

We, the Internet users are being monetized but not rewarded. We are being abused. We want privacy. The current digital advertising model is invasive and broken beyond repair. If you opt-in to receive ads with BAT, you will be able to receive up to 70% [3] of the ad revenue depending on the ad type the current publisher uses – without being tracked by the middlemen.

The BAT/Brave ecosystem puts the power back into our hands.

70% sounds like a lot – and it is. But this would be meaningless without transparency around how your browsing is being attributed to advertising revenue. Brave uses a crystal-clear measurement system to award you BAT, and you can track your progress whenever you like. It also shows you of how much time and privacy you were being robbed from before.

As we said in the beginning: it is again the people truly gaining control over their time and attention.

This is how the dashboard of Brave looks like after just one week of moderate Internet surfing. Take a closer look at the top-left corner and see for yourself from how many harmful trackers and ads it protects you.