Faster, safer and smoother web experience and you get paid too!
OK, so here’s the pitch: what if you get a faster, safer web experience, and get paid while you’re at it? What’s the catch you may ask? Sounds crazy right? Well, it actually is, and the good news don’t stop here, so keep on reading!
What is Brave?
Brave is edited by Brave Software, founded by Brendan Eich. For those who have never heard the name, Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and the former CEO of the Mozilla Foundation. The first version of Brave went out early 2016.
Brave is an open-source web browser, based on chromium, the open-source core of Google’s Chrome browser. This means that Brave benefits from the Chrome Web Store and extensions available for Chrome. The browser focuses on privacy, security, and speed. By default, it blocks unwanted content like ads and trackers and is significantly faster than the competitors.
It’s also empowered with many great features that will make sure you won’t look back if you ever choose to migrate to Brave.
Last but not least, it rewards users with ad revenues the sites generate, at exactly the amount of intrusion the users choose to.
Privacy
One of Brave strong points is the privacy it gives to its users and the amount of control you’ll get on that front. Think of a regular browser with a very powerful ad-blocker enabled by default is pretty much similar than what you’ll get with Brave.
This function is what Brave calls Shields, and parameters are easily accessible to adjust the parameters for each page you visit on the fly. To enter the Shields option, click on the icon available at the right of the address bar, picturing a lion’s head.
A control window will then appear allowing you to select what amount of privacy you’ll want to let go.
Security
Brave‘s other selling point is its security, which comes as a collateral of the Shields features. The same way it prevents sites to collect your personal info, it also filters and blocks by default malicious scripts that could hide in some of the webpages you might stumble upon. There again, click the Lion’s head, and select exactly what you authorize your browser to perform.
Speed
Brave prouds itself to be one the fastest if not the fastest browser available, running 3x to 6x faster than the competition. Although it might be contested, Brave definitively delivers a very smooth and fast browsing experience. Indeed, blocking ads, scripts and trackers results in an enhanced experience as pages load significantly faster.
Settings Import
Often a concern when switching from a browser to a new one is the loss of various info you fed the browser over the years. Brave prevents this to happen as your bookmarks, passwords, and other browser profiles can be imported from your old browser to Brave.
Availability
At this point, you’re already sold, but you wonder if Brave will be available on your device. Well, not to worry, it is available on all major operating systems, including desktop on Windows, Mac or Linux; and on mobile with Android and iOS.
Brave Rewards and BAT
Alright alright, we got it, Brave has it all, it’s free and it’s open-source, it’s fast, secure, doesn’t sell users private data to anyone, and is even compatible with Chrome‘s massive list of extensions. And yeah, it’s cross-platform so unless you’re still using a floppy-disk equipped commodore from the 80’s, you should have no excuse to install and adopt it.
But, did I read well? Will I earn money too? You bet you will! This is possible by enabling Brave Rewards.
Brave Rewards
Brave Rewards is the features to earn free BAT tokens, in exchange to view ads displayed by the browser. This is conveniently available right next to the Shields icon and pictured as an orangey purple triangle, right of the address bar.
Clicking this icon will open a small window where you’ll be able to interact with the settings and your rewards.
Remember we said Brave is blocking ads and trackers by default so you’re not annoyed by those and not affecting in your surfing experience? Well, you can actually choose to view some ads, in which case you will get rewards with free BAT tokens. Select Rewards Settings to enable the option.
What Brave does is it doesn’t replace the ads nor enabling the ads that were here in the first place. Instead, it shows you selected ads as part of Brave Rewards. Those are shown separately from your browsing experience so it’s not at all as invasive. It shows as a notification, as simple as that. And you don’t even need to open it to get your rewards.
Here’s how it shows on desktop:
Rewards amount to no less than 70% of what it generates from the ad revenues. It translates to fractions of BAT token, with a maximum of 5 rewards per hour. You choose the frequency of notifications that works for you.
Token economics – BAT token
BAT stands for Basic Attention Token and is actually an ERC-20 token powered by the Ethereum blockchain. As such it could be stored in any Ethereum wallet.
At the time of writing, BAT is ranking #30 on CoinMarketCap, with a circulating supply of 1,438,404,738 BAT out of 1,500,000,000 BAT total supply.
BAT trades at around 0.18 USD for a total market cap of 265 million USD.
We won’t list here all the places BAT is available to, as there are so many. However, be sure it’ll be on the main centralized exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bittrex just to name a few. But also on the many DEX running on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Finally, there are quite a few options when it comes to available trading pairs.
Check CoinMarketCap for real-time prices.
Resources and Community
Many resources are available directly from Brave’s site and blog.
Also, you might find the latest news or interesting discussions about the project on Brave’s community’s Reddit.
Now you’ve adopted Brave, you might want to enrich the experience with the addition of cool extensions. We would highly suggest:
