Basic Attention Token Review: Everything You Need to Know About BAT

The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a permissionless token that operates on Ethereum Blockchain. It was launched with the intention to ensure more efficient means of digital advertising, improved security, and a fair shake in the Ethereum blockchain.

BAT is the fundamental token for the Brave browser. You can also use it for utility purposes without the presence of third parties. The possibility may seem like an illusion, but it’s, in fact, real.

In this Basic Attention Token review, we explain how it is entirely secure and third-party involvement is restricted.

Brief History of Basic Attention Token

BAT joined the race on 7 January 2018. It is the brainchild of Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox and developer of the Javascript programming language.

It aims at ensuring adequate distribution of funds between the ads advertisers, content publishers, and readers. That way, the parties will concentrate on providing lesser ads that focus mainly on users’ interests while not violating their privacy.

Content publishers, advertisers, and readers were faced with the challenge of unwanted ads and possibly malware. These problems include traditional publishers who encounter an unreasonable decrease in ad proceeds while paying huge fees.

Also, advertisers are not enough to scarce information and mechanisms to provide their content adequately. This is due to centralization and monopolization by available digital platforms.

BAT focuses on eradicating the trouble of third-party advertisement and all its complications as listed above through “User Attention.”

The Basic Attention Tokens are majorly integrated into the Brave Software. But is not restricted to only the browser as other browsers can implement the tokens. Before introducing BAT tokens, the web browser used Bitcoin (BTC) as the accepted currency of payment.

The BAT Development Team

BAT was created by a team of highly intellectual and efficient men, which consisted of various scientists and engineers. They include:

• Brendan Eich, Co-founder of Mozilla Firefox, and JavaScript programming language evolved to be the most pivotal web development programming language.
• Brian Brody, who is also the Co-founder of BAT. He has played vital positions in giant tech companies like Evernote, Khan Academy, and Mozilla Firefox.
• Yan Zhu, the Chief Information Security Officer at Brave. She’s in charge of handling privacy and security.
• Holli Bohren, the Chief Financial Officer.j
• Amongst the teams are several technological gurus and proficient contributors.

Understanding How BAT Works

BAT is currently running on the Ethereum blockchain. It was implemented on the Brave browser Software to facilitate transactions between content publishers, advertisers, and consumers. The BAT attracts users, advertisers, and publishers for several interesting reasons.

For example,

Content publishers deploy their content. Digital advertisers approach the publishers while proffering a quantity of BATs.

The parties negotiate upon the amount and come into an agreement based on the user-tailored data. Readers also earn in BATs as they partake in the transaction(s). They can then choose to use these coins on the browser or donate them to content publishers.

The goal is to provide all users privacy and security and at the same time enabling well-tailored, user-centered ads.

The creators of the Basic Attention Token were inspired by the idea of exploring consumers’ interaction with digital information. They store this information in a shared ledger to improve digital content advertising for all its customers.

The publishers will access more profiting means of income. Advertisers will become more capable of strategizing better according to user attention. And users receive less intruding ads that are tailored to their preferences.

BAT ICO

The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for BAT occurred on the 31^st of May, 2017, as an ERC-20 token (Ethereum-based).

The token was a huge hit by minting about $35 million in less than a minute. Additionally, the Basic Attention Token and developers accumulated $7 million in investment from different venture organizations.

The total income for the overall distribution of the tokens aggregated up to $1.5 billion. Interestingly, a third of it went back to the creative team. This is very fair because they are the originators of these ERC-20 tokens.

However, this restrained amount is being used for more expansion of the BAT platform. We mustn’t forget that the target is improvement and user consistency.

User Consistency Increase

Following the end of the BAT Initial Coin Offering, there was the challenge of getting more users to engage the platform.

The BAT development team decided at the end of 2017 to share well over 300,000 tokens to new users. They also hosted other user-engaging programs.

Apparently, these programs were very rewarding. Currently, new users don’t have to be invited with any kind of advertisement. They come by themselves with anticipation for the BAT tokens.

Brave Wallet

Basically, any wallet that permits the storage of ERC-20 coins will allow one to store BAT tokens. However, there is a highly recommended wallet native to the Brave browser.

That is the “Brave wallet. You can find it in the Brave web browser, right in the Preferences section. You can reach this window by searching for “preferences” in the address bar of the software.

Once you reach here, you select the Brave Payments choice at the left part of the screen and click the payment toggle to “on.”

And you have yourself a BAT wallet!

Other acceptable wallets include Trust Wallet, MyEtherWallet, Offline Wallets, or Exchange wallets.

• Trust Wallet: One of the most preferred crypto wallet which stores ERC721, ERC20 BEP2 token. It’s very easy to use and understand and accessible for iOS, Android, and Web platforms.
• Exchange Wallets: such as Exodus, Binance, Gate.io, etc
• Offline Wallets: These are hardware wallets that can help store cryptocurrencies offline securely.

Basic Attention Token and The Brave Web Browser

The Brave browser is a web browser that ensures high security and privacy. It blocks online trackers, intrusive cookies, and malware while tracking user preferences using blockchain technology.

User Attention is created when users spend more time interacting with digital media content. This is gotten from stored data on the user’s device and is accessed remotely without the user’s knowledge.

BAT rewards content publishers for digital content that has user attending to it. The publisher earns more BATs as more users engage and stay on the content(s). Simultaneously, advertisers’ revenues increase as more of the publishers’ revenue increases.

Brave also uses information from User Attention to assist advisers against fraudulent attacks. The browser also uses sophisticated machine learning algorithms to learn and predict user preferences.

Brave rewards users with BAT tokens as they use the platform and partake in the processes. Users can use these tokens even to acquire access to premium content or even engage in other transactions.  Notwithstanding, most of the returns from ads go to the content publishers, which is determined by the website.

How Do We Measure Attention?

The Brave browser accomplishes this by focusing on keeping users actively engaging a tab in the real world. There is a database that stores which ads have attracted and sustained more users than others.

There is an Almetric “Attention Score” calculator in the browser, which evaluates whether an ad page is viewed for at least 25 seconds and sums up the total time spent on the page. The other data are sent to a segment called Brave ledger system, which analyzes and ensures that both publisher and user are being rewarded, according to the evaluated score.

This allows the BAT protocol to analyze consumer preferences and incentivize the publishers and readers accurately. The platform maximizes the use of complex AI algorithms to analyze user attention and distribute important ads.

Reduced Cost of Data and Eradicating Ad Centralization

Brandan Eich noted the unfair charges in monthly bills which go to ads, intrusive cookies, and bot tracking.  The Brave web browser adequately minimizes bandwidth consumption. It achieves this by restricting insignificant ads and displaying only needful, user-centered data on the users’ devices.

The plan is to replace ad exchanges. These are third-parties which stand as broker-dealers between advertisers and publisher, who are seeking publishing space and ads respectively.

The presence of ad exchangers results in more separation between the advertisers and publishers. Consequently, the ads become more bias, in favor of the third parties, the ad networks.

But, the introduction of the BAT protocol replaces all that centralization of ads networks with a decentralized ecosystem. This provides the advertisers and content creators the ability to communicate directly using Brave’s attention measurement system.

The BAT token can either be used in two ways. It can serve as a utility token within the native browser. You can also use it for transactions by trading with another crypto coin using online public exchanges.

BAT Pricing

As of publishing this article, the Basic Attention Token is in a state of recovering the previous losses. The coin price is at $0.74 and reached its all-time highest price in the month of March 2021.

Image Courtesy of CoinMarketCap

The BAT Market

You can find BAT tokens in many marketplaces. The hype surrounding the token continues to mount. BAT is available on several exchange platforms such as Exodus, Binance, Coinbase Pro, Houbi, etc. Although, over 50% of the overall quantity is presently working on only two of the main exchanges.

The majority of trade transactions happening in the two exchanges is a possible challenge for the Liquidity of the open market. Meaning that this can, in turn, creates an unusual quantity for the size of the BAT in these exchanges.

Why Invest in BAT?   

We have now understood that the BAT token has several benefits that make it very compelling to users. Let’s outline for you a few reasons why crypto investors should make this in the number of their lists.

Publishers

Publishers receive payments from both consumers and advertisers. Thus, encouraging the enlargement of platforms created for publishers. Also, readers can drop feedback directly to publishers, enabling them (publishers) to decide which specific ads they choose to deploy.

Users

As we earlier said, any user can be rewarded in BAT tokens for participating in the BAT platform on the Brave web software.

They do this in a “barter” kind of manner. How do we mean? As a user views an ad, he gets a reward in BAT tokens for watching the ad. Furthermore, he can decide what more to do with the received tokens. Either utilize them to pay for varying services or compensate the publisher by donating them back.

Advertisers

Advertisers make money by listing the BAT token into their ads list. Once they do so, they get the privilege to receive every form of data and many analytics.

The Basic Attention Token learns the user-customized preferences using various mechanisms (including ML algorithms and user-centered measurement systems). This provides advertisers with adequate chances to accept objective data on how well some ads are performing.

Tipping

User-preferred content publishers can be tipped at any point in time by external sites. These publishers can either be bloggers or YouTube content creators.

But since the BAT platform eradicates third-party participation, it utilizes the number of accumulated tips by the content publishers. Tipping in BAT happens through tokens by users, which eventually speeds up the BAT expansion process.

Security

The platform resides upon a three-person system, and this creates a harmonious relationship in the ecosystem. The tokens gather vast information from Brave browser user devices. Third parties cannot intervene in the data evaluation or transactional processes.

The BAT platform eradicates third parties, and in so doing, scam activities also. These (fraudulent activities) are a major consideration in online marketing.

Therefore, the BAT ecosystem provides a very secure platform for users, publishers, and advertisers.

Opportunities and Challenges

While reviewing this token, we found several advantages as well as challenges with the Brave browser and the BAT token. Check them below:

Pros

• The BAT goal is to eradicate third-party ad networks which monopolize the advertising experience by providing a permissionless rewarding ecosystem, to help advertiser, users and content publishers survive upon each other.
• The development team consists of several successful developers who have a track record of active participation in other technological companies.
• The Browser reduces ads and bandwidth.
• With the help of Brave Company, the world becomes more informed about the negative effects of ads.
• The browser has reached up to 10 million users monthly.

However, the advantages, the duo project are also faced with some challenges that must not be ignored now or later on.

Cons

• The token depends on people majorly engaging the Brave Software, whereas that can pose a challenge when it comes to competitions like Safari, Chrome, and even the cofounder’s previous company—Mozilla Firefox.
•  Advertisers in the platform can possibly encounter the issue of making prospects become customers who pay. It appears that Brave browser users have the profiles of:
• Anyone who is knowledgeable and ready to use the ad blocker features.
• Folks that want to receive incentives for clicking on ads.
• If you desire a better browsing experience.
• People who hope to view more important ads.
• People who desire to save cost on data.

One can’t assume to know which of the above-listed attributes perfectly defines a user of the Brave browser. But as it appears, users may have to choose to have the ad blocker as the most prioritized attribute.

But the only way the Brave browser can reward users with high incentives is if only the platform can magnet users who can pay for products gotten from the user-tailored ads in their local browsers.

Unfortunately,  those who use Brave for free tokens for viewing ads may not be able or willing to pay for such products as advertised to them.

This becomes another consideration for advertisers who intend to use the Brave web software to create more ROI and revenue.

Deductions

A company like Brave stands against persistent competitors such as Safari, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox. The user growth is interesting at 10 million monthly users. But, the web software will need a huge and well-timed collaboration to deploy the BAT token more and more into users’ daily experiences.

The proposition of this incentivized platform will have to guarantee advertisers that their investments will lead to real, purchasing customers—Not only ad visibility.

Nonetheless, digital tools that provide data privacy and security should be patronized more often in the coming years.  Privacy has been a major factor in online marketing. Users are more prone to fraudsters daily. But with the emergence of an advanced tool like BAT, scammers will have a hard time stealing from people.

By reducing the interference of malicious ads on the web browser, BAT and Brave have foiled the criminal intents of online scammers. The truth is that many of the ads we see popping up on our browsers may contain malware. So it’s better to reduce the frequency while increasing the efficiency of ads in digital marketing,

Also, third-party ad networks which capitalize upon publishers and advertisers should be discouraged.

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