Basic Attention Token (BAT), is an ERC-20 type token that has been designed with a very clear purpose: to integrate with the Brave browser and be the pillar for the construction of an advertising and rewards system that is more respectful of privacy of users on the Internet.
Uno of token projects Ethereum (ETH) most famous of its ecosystem is the well-known Basic Attention Token or BAT. This token created following the standard ERC-20 of Ethereum, is a utility token which has a very specific purpose: to create a sustainable ecosystem for digital advertising.
With that, BAT seeks to create a whole new online advertising ecosystem that allows maintaining a more balanced business. Especially, transform it into a business that respects the privacy of users, avoiding constant tracking of them. At the same time it offers better products and the ability to earn money while watching advertising.
But how can BAT make all of this work? How did this project start? Well, it is what you will know next.
Origin of Basic Attention Token (BAT)
The origin of BAT dates back to an event that shook the world of free software: the resignation of Brendan Eich from his position as CEO of Mozilla, the company behind the development of the well-known Firefox browser. The reason? Eich would have made a donation in favor of a proposal contrary to Proposition 8 from the state of California. This caused a stir in the community and led to Eich's resignation on April 3, 2014.
For added context, in 2008, Eich personally donated $ 1,000 to the Proposition 8 campaign in the state of California, United States. The initiative was aimed at banning marriage between people of the same sex. The proposal at that time was accepted, and it received the rejection of part of that community.
At that point, Eich who had been recognized for many years for his contributions in the community, especially for the creation of JavaScript (being part of Netscape in 1995), the largest programming language used on the Internet and from which languages such as Solidity, and the creation of it Mozilla in 1998, he retired after the derision of the public and Mozilla employees themselves.
The birth of Brave, the birthplace of BAT
By May 28, 2015, Brendan Eich (CEO) and Brian Bondy (CTO) create Brave Software. At that moment, the construction of the browser begins Brave, based on the free software project Chromium (the same that gives rise to Chrome), which would come to light on January 20, 2016. The idea behind Brave was the creation of a browser that would put user privacy at the center of everything. To achieve this, it would integrate a very powerful ad blocker and tracking that received praise from the community.
However, it did not all end there. Along with the presentation, Eich shed light on a system under development that would allow content creators to publish content on the web, thereby receiving profits through visits and micropayments. In addition, a utility that would allow users to earn money by viewing paid advertising by companies. What is especially innovative in all this is that this system would be in the Brave browser. The idea with this was to transform digital advertising, transform it into a less invasive medium.
BAT's explosive ICO
This was what led to the creation of BAT, an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. In fact, the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) , began on May 31, 2017. In that ICO, a total of 1.000 billion BAT tokens were placed, for a total of 156.250 ethers (about $ 35 million at that time). This initial sale was made in record time: 30 seconds This made clear the enormous interest in this system. In addition to the number of tokens sold, Brave Software acquired 500 million tokens, which they would use to subsidize the project.
The development of all this led to the publication of a test version in June 2018. At that time, a version of Brave preloaded with 250 ads was released. The tests were successful for the development team and they continued with the project. Along with this, with that same release, Brave presented its ability to use the Tor network in an integrated way. The purpose was to allow more private browsing on the web. This was a demonstration that, despite his advertising project, his commitment to privacy was still standing.
Finally, with the launch of Brave 1.0 on November 13, 2019, BAT began to show its potential, demonstrating the viability of its idea, and already supporting a community of more than 8,5 million users by that time.
BAT's mission and objective and its role within Brave
Having said the above, you will wonder What exactly does BAT do? What is your role? Well, the mission and objective of BAT is simple: be the bargaining chip for content creators, advertisers and users who make use of Brave and its integrated browser advertising system, respecting the privacy of users.
Web advertising, a very lucrative business
To understand how this radically changes everything in the world of online advertising, we must first understand how such web advertising works today. Normally what happens in this industry is that large companies (eg: Google Ads or Facebook Ads) create an entire infrastructure to attract companies interested in advertising for their products. And, at the same time, capture websites that seek to monetize their spaces. Thus, these online advertising companies offer advertising packages to their clients. In addition, they also offer monetization packages to owners of web spaces. Companies pay for such advertising, and it is displayed on websites whose owners seek monetization, and everyone is happy.
Yet there is something much darker in all of this. While in the early days of the web, advertising was visually invasive (with bright pop-ups that assaulted you at every turn), at the level of private data, that advertising was benign and almost pristine. Back then, data and metadata tracing was unusual and, in fact, almost non-existent.
But the arrival of Google, the world of massive metadata, and the massification of the Internet itself, led to a radical change in the world of advertising: companies need to know your tastes, they need to know what is on your mind and bombard you with targeted and targeted advertising to exploit that.
And this can only be achieved in one way: spying on all your activity on the Internet. In fact, as soon as you enter search engines like Google, that crawl begins. Tracking is 24/7/365, even when you are not connected to the web, as with Facebook that tracks your activity even outside of Facebook. You can look at it this way: Internet advertising companies are a Big Brother of such magnitude that they make the CIA and Mossad look harmless.
A radical change in the model
Faced with this image, Brave and BAT propose a radical change in concept, which can be reduced to three points:
- Your private data is cryptographically protected, your profile within the system is just a random ID in which information to which you have allowed access can be observed.
- Your time is money and, therefore, every advertisement you see within the system is paid, a payment that you receive in your BAT wallet.
- Businesses seeking advertising get the spaces they seek (by paying for them). Websites and content creators can monetize their spaces (allowing the advertising that interests them to reach their spaces and receive money for it), and users keep their private data protected and away from large advertising companies and their annoying practices of data mining.
And to achieve all this, BAT and blockchain technology are essential, proposing a new, more balanced business scheme aimed at today's digital advertising space. In addition, BAT eliminates intermediaries from the advertising process, allowing companies to go to the spaces directly seeking their attention, and publishers for allowing advertising on their sites. Additionally, advertisers get a better return on investment and more accurate data to analyze with BAT.
In short, BAT is a change in the rules of the game, one that has raised great interest in its model, both in detractors (indicating that it is unfair) and in supportive voices (applauding the decentralization of the advertising system and its respect for the Privacy).
How does BAT work?
BAT's operation begins with its ERC-20 token on Ethereum. The token that can be viewed on the blockchain using this link is a fixed issue token with a total of 1,5 billion tokens. Being based on Ethereum, this token enjoys all the benefits of this platform, such as its ability to interact with the DApps and DeFi ecosystem of this network. This is essential because it decentralizes the spaces in which the token can come to life, allowing for much greater economic dynamism.
In addition to this, the choice of BAT as ERC-20 token facilitates its integration with current Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, thereby allowing the creation of a transparent and decentralized digital advertising platform based on the blockchain.
Thus we have that BAT has the following components:
- Advertising exchange system, with which advertisers can buy advertising space and pay attention to the user.
- Analysis system to measure the impact of advertising.
- A set of machine learning matchmaking algorithms that is responsible for presenting the most relevant cases to advertisers and content creators.
- An advertising attention measurement and reward system.
The BAT token is a dual-use token. First of all, it is used as the unit of account for the payment and collection of advertising, but it is also used as the unit of account for advertising attention within the BAT platform. Thus, advertisers will carry out transactions in BAT to buy ad space and user attention; publishers and content creators will receive advertising revenue and user contributions in BAT; and finally users will be rewarded in BAT for their attention (“ad revenue share”).
When users choose to view ads within the BAT ecosystem, they will be compensated for their attention on BAT. For example, users will receive a 70% revenue share for ads displayed through "private ad slots" (for example, a private ads tab in the Brave browser). And the rest remains in the hands of the owners of said web spaces where said advertising has been shown.
Brave Payments, the heart of the BAT payment system
The heart of the BAT payment system is Brave Payments, a program that allows users to support their favorite publishers and content creators (eg YouTubers, etc.). By default, Brave Payments determines a user's contributions as the user browses, automatically calculating the distribution for settlement at the end of each month based on the time spent viewing content. In fact, this system is closely linked to Brave Rewards, a website that allows you to join this powerful system as a content creator or advertiser.
Users can also set specific contribution amounts regardless of the time spent viewing content, just like Patreon. Currently, users who opt for Brave Payments have a one-way BAT wallet in the browser with multiple financing options that will be used to send their BAT contributions. Future updates will include a multi-directional wallet update that will allow users to transfer BAT (such as BAT obtained from the BAT Ads program) out of the wallet.
A curious point of Brave Rewards is that it asks you to use a KYC confirmation to access the service. For the KYC verification procedure, Brave has made a partnership with the company Uphold, which allows the process to be fast and safe for its users. The idea of using KYC at this point is to prevent the same person from opening multiple accounts and thus receiving more rewards for viewing advertising in multiple browsers, in addition to meeting certain legal requirements for advertising systems.
BAT ads, the evolution of Internet advertising
Users who opt for BAT Ads will receive a portion of the advertising revenue shown to them in the form of BAT. With BAT Ads, user attention is valued. Ads from the BAT ecosystem will primarily be shown to the user directly in private ad spaces (such as a private ads tab) in the form of rich push notifications, full page HTML5 content, landing pages, and more. As stated above, users will receive 70% of ad revenue for viewing ads in private ad slots. In the future, publishers will also be able to opt in and show indirect BAT ads in their content, for which they will receive 70% of the advertising revenue and the user an additional 15%.
BAT is a win-win system in the digital advertising space. Using smart contracts, advertisers send their ads with a token payment in a locked state to users. When a user views the ad, they receive a portion of that token payment, while the rest of the payment goes to the author or website hosting the ad. At the same time, users can surf the web privately while monetizing their attention, while websites recoup a good chunk of revenue and advertisers receive better data on campaigns that allows them to target their messages more effectively.
Currently, the only web browser capable of using the BAT token is the Brave browser, which was created by the BAT development team. Its original roadmap for 2018 indicated that the BAT system would be integrated into other browsers and applications by the end of the year. However, this has not yet happened.
Additionally, users can spend their BAT on various things in the browser, including articles, premium products, donations to content providers or data services. The BAT ecosystem can even be expanded to use micropayments for forum comments and voting.
Basic Attetion Metrics, analyzing the metrics of your advertising
Basic Attetion Metrics (BAM) is a powerful tool that allows advertisers to analyze exact metrics in a unique way, allowing them to have unpublished information about the impact of their advertising campaigns and the impact that their products have on the public, all in one interface capable of being analyzed in real time. That is a capacity that makes any advertising company salivate.
Basically BAM, allows to take the efficiency of digital advertising to a new level, where the advertising machinery and the platform to deploy it are integrated. This allows the creation of an accounting system that anonymously measures user attention to accurately reward posts. This has a positive impact on creating a transparent and decentralized marketplace that connects advertisers, publishers and users.
Additionally, the ability to privately monitor user intent in the browser enables the development of rich metrics that measure actual user attention to the ad. For example, knowing if the impression of an ad has been made on an active tab and simultaneously measuring the seconds in which the user has activated that tab. BAM is made possible by the close relationship between the Brave browser and the BAT system, which allows all this data to be measured with extreme sensitivity on a continuous basis.
BAT wallet, how to access this tool?
Brave's high integration with BAT allows this browser to natively have a wallet for BAT. In fact, the purse is a derivative of Dappradar that allows not only to use BAT, but also to interact with any Web3 application or DApps compatible with MetaMask.
To access this wallet, just run the Brave browser, click on the Start menu and look for the option “Crypto Wallets” or “portfolio” in Spanish.
When you click, the wallet interface will be displayed before you:
The handling at this point is the same as that of a normal cryptocurrency wallet, you can create a new wallet, use a recovery seed to open an already created wallet, or you can use a Ledger or Trezor (Hardware Wallets) for this task.
If you create a new wallet, you will need to choose a password and save it securely.
The same with the seed phrase that will appear in the following process, a piece of information that you must jealously guard:
In the end, you will see an interface very similar to MetaMask with the same options to load your BAT or other compatible cryptocurrencies or tokens directly in your browser. Remember that this is a perfect option to store funds that you will use for example in online purchases or in DApps, and that we do not recommend it as a form of secure storage for your crypto savings.
Where can BAT be used?
Currently, the boom in the use of BAT has allowed it to be accepted in the DeFi ecosystem as a token for loans. Big DeFi platforms like AAVE, Compound y Uniswap, they perfectly accept BAT tokens within their pools. This allows your holders the ability to interact with these protocols and earn a profit on their token holdings.
In addition to this, you can use BAT to collaborate with your favorite content creators whether they are in YouTube or on your own website. For example, Philip de Franco's YouTube channel is one of the first YouTube channels with a BAT content creator certification, and you can see it in this image:
As this there are many spaces, in fact, you can see a very complete list on the website of B.A.T. Growth. In it appear sites like Wikipedia, TradingView, The Guardian, The Washington Post, among other more than 70 thousand sites that actively use this system. To this is added the BraveBAT data in which more than a million additional creators verified within the system stand out, and that are available name to name so that you can verify them. To all these sites you can pay money for their work, or visit them to see advertising on them and receive a profit for it.
The future of this platform
BAT and the Brave ecosystem have a long future ahead of them. Initially, Brendan Eich's vision of BAT and his browser was the laughingstock of many companies. Today, however, BAT has demonstrated the potential to transform digital advertising around the world. With a market capitalization that started at $ 35 million and is now worth hundreds of millions, it is clear that BAT is a healthy ecosystem.
The future of the platform is something yet to be determined, and more if we see that Brave, the browser that drives this growth, continues to strengthen in its use throughout the world.
If we add to that the existence of more than a million creators subscribed to the system, and more than 25 million users (and counting), it is clear that Brave and BAT are a success, and the future is even more promising.
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