While the competition among web browsers is stiff, Brave hopes to set itself apart from the existing collection of Web Browsers by creating a new protocol for the payable web. The long-term goal of this protocol is to allow users to leverage monetary gains from ad-revenue– either through reallocation to promote content creation — or other personal uses.

Ad Share is deposited into the user’s wallet, and may be used to fund publications and content across the web. In this way, Brave protocol can be loosely compared to the self-contained Steemit ecosystem.

Brave ‘User Paths Infographic’ — via www.brave.com/about.html

Of course– users will also have the opportunity to block ads all together– and create a less obtrusive, more focused, browsing experience.

Due to Bitcoin’s inherent block-size restrictions, it would make sense for Brave to latch on to an already established machine payment protocol– like 21.co’s open-sourced protocol, for instance. However, integration with BitGo seems to be the firm’s angle.

After playing around with a beta version of Brave for almost a month, I have come to appreciate its simplicity and speed of use. While it is currently lacking it the style department — and the web payment protocol is not yet implemented; moving forward, I hope that the full release polishes up the UX, fully implements the payable web, and becomes a major competitor to the other open-sourced browser: — Firefox.

In the way that Instagram took on Snapchat’s stories, web browsers have been implementing each others’ features since the creation of the first web browser, Netscape (in 1994) and its rivalry with Internet Explorer.

With the inclusion of ad-black in iOS, Apple has already taken an anti-ad stance. Hopefully, in the future, the major browsers will follow suit and allow users to leverage their time spent viewing ads in order to promote the creation of more highly-valuable web content — and bring this standard to mobile.

Finally, in the long term, regardless of whether or not Brave succeeds, I believe that its feature offerings will eventually be absorbed into mainstream browsers, thus making Brave an important release in the world of Fintech. I hope to see future browsers with digital wallet integration, and would especially like to see this feature embedded within the mobile OS.