Brave launches $500,000 BAT giveaway per month for browser users, alongside monthly payments to Brave Publishers.

Today, we are starting a monthly giveaway of about 500,000 USD in promotional Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) to Brave desktop browser users on a first come, first serve basis. The new BAT grant program gives users approximately 5 USD in promotional BAT. The grants, which must be used for the benefit of content creators within 90 days, come from the User Growth Pool (UGP), a fund of 300 million tokens set up to give users and publishers an incentive to join the BAT platform.

Users can claim the grants via a notification they will receive or by checking the status of the integrated Payments settings or preferences panel in the latest Brave browser (version 0.22.727). The grants can be used to support users’ favorite sites, YouTube channels, and Twitch streamers.

Brave currently has 2.7 million monthly active users. With regular BAT grants that reward them for browsing with Brave, we expect more people to adopt the Brave browser as they see the benefits of its speed, privacy, and integrated wallet capable of supporting content creators.

Over 16,000 creators (including YouTube and Twitch accounts) have joined the Brave Publishers program. The over 11,000 YouTube channels together have in excess of 200 million subscribers. Monthly BAT payments to creators come from two sources: user donations and the creator referral program.

Brave users donate to creators with BAT they purchase and load into Brave Payments, or that are gifted to them from BAT grants. Previously, $1M equivalent in BAT was allocated to creators from BAT originally gifted from the UGP in January 2018 to Brave users.

There are also over 7,700 creators currently participating in the ongoing Brave referral program, earning approximately $5 in tokens for each user they bring to the Brave browser. We recently distributed the first part of the referral program directly to online publishers and content creators, as part of our monthly transfer of earned BAT. If you are a creator who participates in this referral program, you can check your Brave Payments balance and collect your BAT today. If you are not currently enrolled, you can still join as BAT awards are still available.

We instituted fraud-prevention measures as we have expanded BAT rewards. For the past 6 months, as we increased user growth pool grants, we applied activity detection models to uncover suspicious activities. Early development involved human review, which eventually got codified. This enabled us to identify fraudulent accounts before making settlements. Regarding suspicious account owners who had reached out to our community support and publisher support teams to dispute findings, we engaged with them and were able to determine if they had legitimate claims. As we start automating our monthly grant and settlement processes, we are scaling those findings and will be able to automatically suspend accounts with suspicious activities. Owners of such accounts can still reach us to discuss conclusions via our support email.

We have also improved the Brave Payments process for creators by working with our partner Uphold to eliminate dormancy fees for accounts and compensate account holders for any such fees that may have been charged.

We look forward to this uniform monthly payment system to benefit users of the BAT platform and contribute to publisher revenue, at a time when many are challenged to fund their creative efforts. Brave browser users will soon also be able to opt in to view private ads and receive 70% of the associated ad revenue. By rewarding users and creators while respecting privacy, BAT’s utility increases.

Note: The tokens for user grants and the referral program are released from the BAT User Growth Pool (UGP), which was created prior to the sale of the 1 billion tokens in May 2017. The UGP consists of 300 million tokens (plus reserves), set aside to give users an incentive to join the Brave platform. We anticipate distributing promotional BAT monthly to current and new Brave-verified publishers. The approximate 5 USD worth of promotional BAT was set at the time of this announcement. We will try to maintain the grants as close to 5 USD as possible, but some variation will occur.