“We are going bigger. Much bigger,” proudly read the headline on the Brave Browser‘s website at the beginning of the year when a few influencers declared their support for the platform.
Half a year turned out to be like almost a decade in crypto-time as the whole market turned upside-down in the meantime. However, it seems that “almost a decade” is enough to go “much bigger.”
We may never know if developers behind Brave Browser anticipated the growth, but recently published results are formidable indeed.
The founder and CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich went to Twitter yesterday to announce the exact numbers. Over 3 million users, 413k Basic Attention Token (BAT) wallets, more than 18k verified publishers, with a very realistic prediction of more than 5 million users before the end of the year.
Considering that it has been a month since the stable release, we can comfortably acknowledge that the team hit the nail on the head.
How did they do it?
Firstly, Brave Browser is incentivizing contributors and consumers to use the software. Publishers are rewarded with BAT tokens by surfers who received a small amount of that cryptocurrency when they installed the browser. The user-friendly interface enables both parties to give and receive rewards without endless menus and settings. Publishers publish, surfers surf. Everything else is automatic.
Secondly, while the majority of informatically literate surfers extend their browsers with AdBlock to bypass ads, Brave just integrated it into the platform to provide the ultimate experience.
Thirdly, but not less important, Brave has addressed the privacy issue. Brave’s servers cannot see or store user’s browsing data, which means that, until the user erases the data, it is stored on his/her device exclusively. The importance of this is paramount, moreover because we were witnesses to more than a few personal information selling scandals.
The thing that the development team likes to emphasize is the speed of their browsing platform, and it turned out that the platform lives up to the expectations. The thorough testing revealed that Brave is indeed much faster than Chrome and Firefox.
At last, there is the famous volatile nature of cryptocurrencies. Earning BAT tokens by publishing content wouldn’t be so attractive without the permanent possibility of growth, because owning cryptocurrency is always considered as an investment and BAT token seems to have a future.
According to CoinMarketCap.com, BAT sits at 50th place and trades at $0,24 per token, which is still far away from the all-time high of $0,86 but seeing that the price hasn’t bottomed out during the recent bear market period can be a sign of great things to come.
Being so interconnected with the industry on the rise, which cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology definitely are, is incentivization of users per se. The apparent ease of use and surfing speed adds up to the equation.
The real use cases of cryptocurrencies are still relatively rare, so Brave is a shining example of how the “Brave new tech” can disrupt the establishment.