It’s no secret that the current crypto bear market has been unforgiving to investors, projects, and overall morale. From this experience, one harsh reality that has been made clear by the markets is that it will no longer accept an ongoing string of false promises. The market is demanding to see real solutions and adoption for the thousands of different cryptocurrencies currently trading on CMC.
Across the entire crypto landscape, projects of all sizes have been promoting their own set of broken promises. Whether it is Ethereum’s major delay in launching Casper, Filecoin going radio silent since 2014, failure of any Dapp to capture more than 100 monthly active users, or 95% of crypto projects failing to deliver a working project, it has been made clear that the market needs a reason to become excited again. Right now, the only project offering a working project of everyday value, and is also protecting online user privacy during the peak of centralization and interconnectedness is Basic Attention Token. This project shines on so many different aspects, from the background of the team to the funding of the project to product adoption and everything in between.
Basics:
- The BAT project started in 2017 and is based in San Francisco
- The BAT is a token of exchange in a secure, anonymous, opt-in advertising system based in the Brave Browser
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The BAT system provides:• Users: strong privacy and security when viewing advertisements, improve relevance and performance, and a share of tokens.• Publishers: improved revenue, better reporting, and less fraud.• Advertisers: less expensive customer attention, less fraud, and better attribution.
- Unlike many blockchain projects, BAT has already introduced a fully functioning product and has more than 5 million users worldwide
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Ticker: BATPrice: $.13Ranking by Market Cap: 32Market Capitalization: $160,930,284Circulating Supply: 1,221,899,089 BAT Max Supply: 1,500,000,000 BAT24hr Trading Volume: $4,834,700
Team:
- The BAT team is lead by Brendan Eich who has been nothing short of a legend in the technology space. He is the original creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox.
- The co-founder and CTO is Brian Bondy. His prior experience focuses on building secure and privacy-preserving web and distributed systems. He also spent several years working with Brendan at Mozilla.
- The BAT team has an additional 8 blockchain developers and engineers
- Rounding out the BAT team are 5 business developers and strategists
Drivers of Growth:
- Today’s web experience is marked by unprecedented levels of spam and privacy violations. Even traditional mobile advertising creates tremendous a burden on users that can result in $23 per month in data charges, slow page loads, and as much as 21% less battery life.
- In response to today’s terrible web experience, over 600 million mobile devices employ ad-blocking software globally. Traditional publishers have lost approximately 66% of their revenue over the past decade, adjusted for inflation. Publishers face falling revenue, users feel increasingly violated, and advertisers’ ability to assess effectiveness has diminished.
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BAT is positioned well to solve the problem of monetizingpublisher content while protecting user privacy. The flow of their system is outlined in the diagram below:
4. BAT has continuously demonstrated market demand by growing its users from 1 million monthly active users at the beginning of 2018 to over 5.5 million users today.
5. Going into the release of BAT’s 1.0 desktop browser, which will reward users for opting in for Brave Ads, I am confident that this added incentive will propel the growth of the network even further.
6. BAT is consistently improving their browser and has recently improved content loading time by 22% on desktop since their previous release.
7. BAT knows the importance of mobile users (80% of their users) and has successfully delivered significant performance gains, which has helped their team pass 10 million downloads for their Android app.
8. There are now more than 28,000 verified publishers who are participating in Brave rewards, allowing them to reconnect with their audience.
9. Absolutely love the fact that their browser is Tor compatible which highlights their commitment to user privacy.
10. BAT has also made some high profile partnerships including Dow Jones Media Group, HackerNoon, HTC, & Qwant to help bring premium content to new users.
11. BAT is also starting to work with lawmakers in the US and Europe, calling for more privacy protection laws for users. They even filed GDPR complaints against surveillance adtech and wrote to the US Senate making a case for the US to adopt some kind of GDPR laws.
12. The project is backed by several high profile funds such as Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, DCG, Danhua Capital, and Huiyin Blockchain Venture.
Headwinds:
- Unfortunately, the software does crash more than I would like it to, but hopefully, the bugs will be fixed before the 1.0 launch.
- The success of this project will not only be determined by how good BAT’s product is but also whether it will be user friendly.
- Since regulation will always trail innovation, the digital currency space can be subject to new regulations in the future.
Conclusion:
BAT is more than just a blockchain project. It is actually defending your basic human right to privacy by protecting the data and browsing profile across your devices using client-side encryption. Brave cuts out all malicious third-party trackers, eliminates data leakage of your private information, and malware risk. Brave does all this while providing publishers with a larger revenue share for their efforts than today’s inefficient and opaque marketplaces. With interconnectedness and centralization at its peak in the digital world, Brave is resetting the online ad-based Web ecosystem to create a new set of Web standards.
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