Be Brave and invest in Basic Attention Token
A lot has been said about the power of block-chain and crypto tokens that power the block-chain. There have been various crypto projects ever since Bitcoin and block-chain became mainstream. Approximately 2,957 cryptocurrencies are being traded with a total market capitalisation of $221bn (as of October 8th 2019). Every coin/token/crypto project tries to solve a traditional problem by using block-chain. Most of these projects have not seen the light of the day, quite a few even turning out to be scams. However, I would like to talk about one specific project and a token which has a great working product - Basic Attention Token (BAT).
What is Basic Attention Token (BAT)?
To understand what is BAT, you need to understand the background behind it's creation, the purpose with which it was created, the problem that its trying to solve.
Modern Age Digital Advertising
Online advertisement (or even offline for that matter) has three main participants - a) Users (who surf the internet, consume content and watch the ads), b) Content creators/publishers (who create exciting content and earn ad revenue by allowing third party ads on their platforms) and c) Advertisers (who want to advertise their products/services to the Users. The current system of online advertisement is bad for all the three participants.
How will BAT solve this problem?
The BAT team has created a new web browser, called the Brave Browser. Brave is a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks malvertisements, trackers, and contains a ledger system that anonymously captures user attention to accurately reward publishers.
The Basic Attention Token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the BAT platform, as it is exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. The token’s utility is derived from — or denominated by — user attention. Attention is really just focused mental engagement — on an advertisement, in this case.
The Brave browser knows where users spend their time, making it the perfect tool to calculate and reward publishers with BATs. This service creates a transparent and efficient Blockchain-based digital advertising market. Publishers receive more revenue because middlemen and fraud are reduced. Users opt-in to an inclusive and rewarding private ad experience. And advertisers get better data on their spending.
So basically, BAT will be a utility token used within the ecosystem of Brave Browser (for now. BAT will have more use cases in the future which I will discuss towards the end of this article). The users will continue surfing the net the way did it with Chrome or Internet Explorer and enjoy consuming content from their favorite publishers. They will get ad notifications in a non-intrusive manner which they can chose to click or ignore. If they click on those ads, they will get rewarded in BAT in their uphold wallet which they can use to either tip their favorite publishers or withdraw to their bank (available only for select countries as of now). They will also be able to withdraw it to their wallets in the future. Advertisers will pay for the ad spots in BAT to the publishers out of which some portion of it will go to Brave and Users and the remaining will be transferred to the publisher's BAT wallet.
How it works?
The Brave browser anonymously monitors user attention, then rewards publishers accordingly with BATs.
Measuring Attention
Attention is measured as users view ads and content in the browser’s active tab in real time. The Attention Value for the ad will be calculated based on incremental duration and pixels in view in proportion to relevant content, prior to any direct engagement with the ad. They will define further anonymous cost-per-action models as the system develops. Ads are then anonymously matched with customer interests using local machine learning algorithms. This means fewer irrelevant ads. Brave will work with publishers and advertisers to establish best practices for judging user attention. One potential metric: the number of total views of advertising content for a certain number of seconds. Or, points assigned on the length of a view.
Who gets what?
Users viewing ads will be rewarded with BATs. BATs can be used for premium content or services on the BAT platform. Publishers will, as part of this service, receive the lion’s share of the total ad revenue. Brave anticipates that users will also donate back some tokens to publishers, further increasing their revenue.
More Privacy, Less Fraud
Brave plans to mitigate possible ad fraud through the use of cryptography, better client-side integrity, and transparency achieved through open source.
Why invest in BAT?
- Working product: The most important thing that gets me excited about Brave is that they already have a working product - The Brave Browser.
- Experienced Founder: BAT and Brave is founded by Brendan Eich the inventor of internet game-changers like JavaScript, Netscape Navigator (RIP), and Mozilla Firefox. In fact, Brave browser is also built on Chromium just like Google Chrome.
- Limited supply: BAT has a limited supply of 1.5 billion coins. As and when the number of users using Brave increases, the number of advertisers and content creators will also increase. Advertisers will have to buy BAT to advertise on Brave, thereby leading to increased demand and price of BAT.
- Multiple use cases in the future: BAT will be used for multiple other use cases apart from the Brave browser (as per the team). There are use cases for BAT in gaming, messaging etc. This will only drive the demand and price of BAT in the upward direction.
- Brave Browser Has More Than 100 Million Downloads: There are several reasons to consider Brave:
Improved internet privacy - online privacy, particularly when it comes to browsing history, is difficult to come by. Brave offers a browsing platform that maintains no records of your online activity to third parties. Publishers simply cannot access users without agreeing to the terms and conditions and becoming verified.
More enjoyable browsing experience - who doesn’t long for web pages that load without display ads on the top, bottom, right, left, and in-between-paragraphs areas? Using Brave, every single one of those ads is gone. Sites load faster. You see the content you wish to see. That’s it.
Integration with Cryptocurrency world - BAT may be the answer for those looking for a tangible reason to invest in a new cryptocurrency with an immediate use. Not only can fiat be converted into BAT using an exchange such as Uphold, but other cryptocurrencies can be converted to BAT.
You can download the Brave browser here.
6. An Increasingly Strong Adoption By The Publishers: The Basic Attention Token model aims to achieve a more equal distribution of advertising revenue between users, advertisers and publishers. Revenue share for publisher ads is:
- 70% to publisher
- 15% to Internet user
- 15% for the Brave Browser editor
User ads are available since April 2019 with the following revenue share:
- 70% to Internet user
- 30% for the Brave Browser editor
This model appeals to users as shown by the success of Brave Browser in terms of downloads. However, for it to be sustainable, they also need to see a real adoption of the business world and content publishers in particular.
The good news for Basic Attention Token is that this is exactly the case!
The BATGrowth site allows you to track the adoption of Basic Attention Token by publishers on websites or platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Twitch or Reddit. In total, Brave Browser has nearly 300,000 publishers, including 200,000 on YouTube alone, with a number that has increased tenfold since the beginning of 2019 on this platform!
Another ultra-positive indicator concerns the number of addresses holding BAT tokens, which has doubled since April 2019, from 98,000 to just over 200,000.
In short, the adoption of the model promoted by Basic Attention Token is accelerating and the trend is expected to continue in 2020.
7. The Price Of The BAT Is Still Very Affordable
As you can see, all the conditions are in place for Basic Attention Token to become a huge success in 2020 and beyond. Its innovative advertising model is spreading to users more and more quickly and its adoption by the business world is also following its path.
With such solid fundamentals, the Basic Attention Token project will be very successful in the future. A great success with many users means a sharp increase in the price of the BAT token that circulates between users, advertisers and publishers.
The good news is that the price of BAT remains very affordable.
What's not good about BAT?
Controversy Surrounding ICO: Basic Attention token [BAT] also has the dubious distinction of having one of the most controversial ICOs ever. The BAT ICO raised a staggering $35 million…..in 30 seconds. Just think about that for a second. The amount of time we took to write this paragraph was enough for BAT to raise their required capital.
One buyer paid $4.7 million worth of Ether to buy the tokens. Another user paid $6000 worth of mining fees to virtually guarantee their spot at the top of the pile. Only 130 people bought the tokens with 5 people buying half of the supply. In fact, you can look at the pie chart here to see the token distribution:
Obviously, this clearly means that the BAT tokens are not exactly decentralized and evenly distributed…to put it very mildly.
Conclusion: What is Basic Attention Token
Basic Attention token [BAT] has such a high-quality team that it is not a matter of IF they will disrupt digital advertising or not, but WHEN. BAT could genuinely be one of the most revolutionary projects out there. Let’s hope that they can carry their positive momentum and give us a product we will widely use in the future.
FAQs pertaining to BAT and Brave:
- Where can you buy BAT? You can buy BAT on most popular exchanges - Binance, Coinbase etc.
- What is the ranking of BAT? #31 (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/)
- What's the total BAT supply and market cap? Market cap - $314,365,357 USD. Circulating Supply - 1,430,500,738 BAT. Total Supply - 1,500,000,000 BAT
Text Resources:
- White paper link - Click here
- Why Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a Promising Crypto Investment - Hackernoon
- Is Basic Attention Token (BAT) A Good Investment? In-depth Analysis and Near to Longer-Term Expectations - Publish0x
- Learn What is Basic Attention Token: The Most Comprehensive Guide Ever - Blockgeeks
- Reasons Why Basic Attention Token Is The Most Promising Cryptocurrency For 2020 - Sylvain Saurel
- BAT official website - https://basicattentiontoken.org/
Cryptocurrency Trade and Business operations, Manager - Wealth at ZebPay
5 年Well written Manan Vora, CA, BGL, CFE Your article is very engaging and extremely useful. Go Brave !!!