Basic Attention Token (BAT) Seeing Price Gains – Is it a Brave New World?

BAT, the token set to reward users of the Brave browser for viewing adverts, is one of a few coins that showed green last week when others didn’t. Despite last week’s price slump, BAT is up 3.92 percent across the last seven days and up over five percent in the past day.

BAT’s performance has been as volatile as any other cryptocurrency in recent months. It hit a high of $0.86 in February 2018 and is currently sitting around $0.18.

BAT is a coin with potential, created alongside the open-source Brave browser. It’s set to be the coin advertisers pay for Brave services with, and which is passed on to Brave users when they view adverts. Brave users can also reward their favorite sites by donating in BAT.

Though Brave and BAT can exist independently, created by the same team, they are very much integrated with one another.

The duo is a creation of Javascript inventor and Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich, who has plenty of experience going up against the likes of Google and Microsoft.

The Brave browser is advertised to be faster and safer than competitors—capable of blocking adverts, malware, cookies, and trackers. Restoring the complete privacy of the user, browsing history is never stored on Brave’s servers, only on the user’s device.

Why is BAT’s Price Rising?

Founder Eich revealed more of the plans for the promised Brave user rewards of BAT in August 2018, including that users are now testing adverts and payment methods ready for roll out.

Something that could be garnering attention for Brave this week is Eich’s letter to the U.S Senate calling for a U.S version of Europe’s new data protection policy GDPR. The EU’s chief privacy regulator, Andrea Jelinek, referred to the letter in her testimony to a U.S Senate Committee.

Also this week, Brave upgraded its desktop version, fixing security issues. Just last week, October 5, 2018, Eich boasted that Brave had achieved 4.6 million monthly active users as well over 28,000 publishers and creators.

Eich also promised that Brave is stepping on the gas to make good on the promise of user rewards in BAT and “@attentiontoken economics.”

Brave’s Chief Product Officer David Temkin was asked recently if Brave is a privacy browser or an ecosystem for BAT tokens. His answer summed up Brave and BAT’s ethos:

“I view two propositions (privacy and BAT ecosystem) as integrated. Meaning, the reason for the need for the privacy browser in the first place is advertising-based surveillance without consent. The remedy for that underlying problem is not merely to block the trackers, but to supplant the underlying economic drivers that created this mess in the first place, with the BAT ecosystem—i.e., to create a new content economy that properly respects users, content creators—as well as advertisers.”

Google is currently recovering from the revelation that Google+ was breached, while Facebook is continuing to face questions about its latest data issue in September. Many of the technology platforms we use day-to-day are facing increased scrutiny over how they monitor and use the personal data of users. Most of them earn millions from advertising. In light of this, could we be looking at a Brave new world of browsing?

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