Brave is a decentralized, open source browser that puts the user first by making online privacy its first priority. Brave also claims to be twice as fast as Chrome on desktop and eight times faster than Safari on mobile.
The man behind the Brave browser is CEO, Brendan Eich. Brendan started his career at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995 with the intent to put Scheme "in the browser." In early 1998, Brendan co-founded the Mozilla project. And his most recent initiative was creating the Basic Attention Token (BAT), a cryptocurrency designed for use in the Brave browser when users view and share in the ad revenue. In the ecosystem, advertisers will give publishers BATs based on the measured attention of users.
If you don’t care for the ads, the Brave browser has an inbuilt ad and tracker blocker. The blocker inhibits trackers from learning more about a user for monetization purposes.
But at the end of the day, we all have to eat and put food our table right?
Twitter user Yannick Eckl, aka "cryptonator 1337," on Saturday revealed that when he searched for Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, he was redirected to an affiliate version of the URL that profited Brave.
The controversy grew when Larry Cermak, director of research at The Block, a research, analysis and news brand in the digital asset space, began digging into Brave's code on GitHub. He uncovered more redirects to another cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, and two cryptocurrency wallet sites, Ledger and Trezor.
In a series of tweets, Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, acknowledged that the company had made a mistake and would correct it.
"But we seek skin-in-game affiliate revenue, too. This includes bringing new users to Binance & other exchanges via opt-in trading widgets/other UX that preserves privacy prior to opt-in," he wrote.
"It includes search revenue deals, as all major browsers do," Eich continued. "When we do this well, it's a win for all parties. Our users want Brave to live."
Two years ago, claims made by the New York Times and UK media stated that Cambridge Analytica tried to influence how Americans voted using information from 50 million Facebook without their permission.
Last year according to The New York Times, Facebook shared more user data with third-party companies than it has previous admitted. Specifically, Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.
Also in 2019, 540 million of the records, including account names, comments and likes, were publicly available on Amazon’s cloud servers after they were uploaded by two third-party apps.
I thought the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the end of Facebook. I was totally wrong as Facebook recent hit all-time highs. Why, because the users continue to use Facebook and companies are more than happy to continue to advertise to those users.
I envision the same thing will happen with this recent Brave mishap. Yes, few will leave forever and yes, Brave mad a boo-boo, but the majority of the existing users will continue to use the Brave browser.
Earlier this year the browser’s userbase saw a two-fold increase in monthly active users and tripled its daily active users to 3.3 million. And according to Brave, the daily active users stand at 5.3 million now which is up from 2 million one year ago.
So where is the Brave token price headed next, the chart suggests after a recent run up in price, it's time for the BAT token to take a breather.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn't financial advice. Do your own research before making investment decisions.