Is Basic Attention Token (BAT) A Good Investment?

Brave Browser is a Chromium browser without all the features from Google. It is also one of the few adblock browsers with native adblock capabilities. Many people like it and it’s massively popular with over 10 million downloads on Google Play Store alone. Behind Brave Browser, there’s this cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Token (BAT), which serves as the core economy of Brave Browser.

Of course, the idea is that the demand for BAT would rise when there’s more demand for Brave Browser. Thanks to Ethereum’s smart contract, BAT is here to accompany Brave Browser. And so far, this business model has been proven to be successful. But here’s the more important question. Is BAT a good long-term investment? Well, let’s try to find out together, shall we?

The Basic Idea Of Brave Browser and Basic Attention Token

First of all, let’s see where the demand comes from. Brave Browser, as mentioned above, is another Chromium browser with native adblock capabilities. It’s hugely popular with more than 10 million of downloads and millions of active users. Brave browser has been used by plenty of users all around the world, especially those people who care so much about privacy.And considering that it’s based on Chromium, all the Chrome extensions that you love would also work perfectly on Brave.

Both crypto and non-crypto users like their web browsing experience with Brave. It’s comparable to other Chromium browsers such as Vivaldi or Microsoft Edge.One difference is that Brave Browser is natively designed to support crypto economics. The token that empowers the browser is called Basic Attention Token (BAT).

So, Brave Browser doesn’t block all ads. It actually gives options to the users to watch ads if they want to. However, if they choose to watch ads, they will be rewarded with BAT tokens. The users are incentivized to watch ads, unlike in Chrome. The ads are considered non-intrusive as they will be displayed by system notification instead of inside the web pages.

Of course, BAT tokens are not only used to incentivize the users. They are also automatically shared with the web publishers. Meanwhile, advertisers pay fiat to the Brave team and the fiat will be automatically converted to BAT to be shared among the publishers and the browser users.

Considering the fact that Brave Browsers still have ads (even though the default option is not turned on), there are some controversies and debates inside the Brave community. Some hardcore users believe it’s hypocritical for Brave team to take off ads from websites while they themselves have an ad marketplace mechanism that utilizes a crypto token. These users eventually “forked” Brave browser and they created Bold browser, a tokenless Brave browser without any ad system. 

So, Is BAT A Good Investment?

Now we have arrived at the most important question. Is BAT a good investment? Well, here’s the thing. If Brave browser can keep growing and they can attract a good number of serious advertisers, obviously the price to advertise will go up, and the users (who view ads) and the publishers will benefit more from the Brave Rewards marketplace. 

However, this is a big if. In 2020, many traditional companies have decided to cut off their advertising budget, and Brave has more dependency on crypto advertisers to reach their audience. There’s also no real metrics to show how targeted the ads are despite what the Brave team has said.

Nevertheless, Brave has plenty of corporate partnerships. Its founder, Brendan Eich, is a big name in the web browsing business. He was the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla Firefox. That’s why Brave Browser has a decent success rate despite the fact that its adoption rate is still below both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.If you believe in the future of Brave Browser, BAT is the right token for you. It’s a good long-term investment.

Among other smart contract powered tokens in the Ethereum blockchain, BAT has one of the best use cases.