Exploring Tokens – The Basic Attention Token (BAT)
If you’ve been following the crypto news recently you probably saw a headline about an ICO that raised $35 million in just 30 seconds. That beat the previous record of $25 million in 15 minutes from the Aragon Network Token (ANT) sale.
That ICO was the Basic Attention Token (BAT), the token for the Brave browser.
The Brave browser is the brainchild of Brendan Eich. He’s best known as the former CTO and CEO of Mozilla. Mozilla is a free-software community. And one of its better known products is the Firefox web browser. Eich is also the creator of the JavaScript programming language.
With such a credentialed history its easy to see how the token sale sold out so quickly. The reports are that only 130 investors got to participate and 5 got nearly half the coins. I know I was too late by 90 seconds.
BAT is an ERC20 token, so it runs on the Ethereum network. There’s a cap of 1.5 billion coins. A total of 13.3% went to the Brave team, 20% went towards the growth pool, and the remaining coins were distributed in the ICO. Brave was able to raise $35 million, which puts the cost of each BAT token at $0.035. It’s since traded as high as $0.34. Not bad if you were able to get some.
The goal of the Brave browser and BAT token is to reinvent the digital advertising model. Digital advertising is dominated by Google and Facebook. The web browsing experience is laden with inefficient, power hogging advertising.
The Brave browser is ad-free browsing. They claim this improves computer search speeds by 2x and mobile search speeds by 4x. And the BAT token is used by advertisers for advertising and attention based services. Users can both earn BAT tokens and uses them to reward publishers for their content.
It’ll be interesting to see if the Brave browser gains traction. It’s a lot to ask a person to switch their web browser. People tend to stick with what they are comfortable with.
I’ve tried out the Brave browser and have a mixed opinion. It’s definitely faster being ad free. But some sites I do want cookies so my settings stay the same.
If you want to take a deeper dive on the Brave browser and Basic Attention Token you can find the white paper here.
Interesting article. Really appreciate you bring this to our attention. Buy low, sell high, it seems so simple but most investors still don't seem to get it :-) Besides coinmarketcap.com there is: https://www.coincheckup.com I don't know any other site that gives such good inisghts in the team, the product, advisors, community, the business and the business model, etc. Check: https://www.coincheckup.com/coins/Basic Attention Token#analysis To see the: Basic Attention Token Investment analysis.
I was buying some UBIQ on sunday and spotted BAT at 17cents. I picked up a handful at 19 with leftover BC and will watch, seems that ICO (eth grab) is putting a little too much control of both Eth and BAT in the hands of a few, I'm just going to watch it a bit before going in any deeper, thanks for the article.
Yea I'm concerned about the concentrated holdings too. Who are these people and what are their plans to sell? It could keep a lid on BAT for a while. I think we'll see a change in the way ICOs are done. Vinny Lingham put out a piece yesterday regarding the Civic ICO... I haven't read it yet... but know they are planning a fairer distribution model.
Ps - I'll have to check out UBIQ, keep hearing that name.
This was a very interesting read, thank you for taking the time. Hope your day is lovely! :-)
You are very welcome!
Nice here is my take
https://steemit.com/bat/@ender/bat-great-idea-but-i-don-t-think-token-will-be-worth-much
Thanks for sharing!
Any idea if/when BAT tokens can be earned on its mobile browser? Haven't seen anything specifically called out in the roadmap.
Not yet, waiting to see how it will be implemented.