Will BAT Fly After New Brave Upgrade?

Chromium’s latest release has included an improvement to the Brave (BAT) payment interface with a 22% improvement on loading times. Brave Software is the company behind the open source ad blocker, Brave browser. They have revealed a new version of its browser which is 22% faster with a better user interface for Basic Attention Token (BAT) rewards. According to the reveal, Brave’s desktop browser is now Chromium based which means it’s built from Google’s open source web browser project. Google extensions are therefore supported as well. The version prior to this update was based on a specialised toolkit developed by the Brave team called Muon. This also allows developers to develop their own browsers or similar like applications. The upgrade comes with a handful of significant improvements which was confirmed by a test released to the public which studies browser performance across two key factors, how fast it is at loading pages and how much resources are used with a focus on the CPU. According to SludgeFeed, the two tests resulted in an average and a median load time savings of over 20%. Brave notes this ultimately as much as an 8 second faster page loading time on major sites. Furthermore, the upgrades to performance improvements, Brave has made some changes to its BAT reward system to be more perceptive. The Brave team commented saying:

“Brave Rewards replaces Brave Payments with improved usability, more visibility, and new features. With this release, Brave Rewards enters beta. We look forward to getting your feedback on this redesigned approach.”

Brave has recently reached a new milestone in which it has received over 10 million downloads as well as having over 4 million active monthly users. In the markets, BAT is currently priced at around $0.21 which is giving the project a $210 million market, making it the 41st biggest altcoin according to CoinMarketCap. The team at Brave announced back in March this year that they had the development timeline for the newly redesigned Brave 1.0 browser for desktop operating systems. It’s one that utilises Chromium’s native interface and that supports nearly all Chrome features and extension APIs. According to the Brave website:

“In addition to featuring leading privacy and security benefits, Brave Core is showing radical performance improvements (beyond what is achieved by simply blocking unwanted content), offering average and median load time savings of 22%, which translates into as much as 8-second faster page loads on certain sites.”

On the website, the post goes into the performance of Brave Core improvements and how the new version is going to benefit the user. The team's main focus is on the loading times of different pages and the tracing infrastructure exposed by the Chromium code base. Brave’s very own cryptocurrency, BAT (Basic Attention Token) came from the same mind that created JavaScript, Brendan Eich. The venture is funded by Foundation Capital, Pantera Capital, Founders Fund and many more. What is BAT? Basic Attention Token is something massively improves the efficiency of digital marketing by creating a brand new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers and users. All of this is possible thanks to the Ethereum blockchain. The token can be used to obtain several attention-based and advertising services on the BAT platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement. According to the website: Users are abused  

• Up to 50% of the average user’s mobile data is for ads and trackers, costing as much as $23 a month.

• Ads use about 5 seconds of mobile load time on average.

• Ads decrease phone battery life by as much as 21%.

• Privacy is violated when large media sites host up to 70 trackers.

• Malware (malvertisements, ransomware) is up 132% in one year.

  Publishers are hurting  

• Google and Facebook take 73% of all ad dollars and 99% of all growth.

• Revenue is recently down 66%.

• Bots inflicted $7.2 billion in fraud last year.

• Over 600 million phones and desktops run ad-blocking.

• Publishers cannot seamlessly monetize value-added services.

  Advertisers are losing  

• Advertisers lack good information on what they are paying for.

• Marketers are often fooled by bogus websites and bots that commit fraud.

• Targeting is poor, making users more likely to ignore ads.

  Could the new improvements to Brave Increase BATs price? With the new improvements for Brave being built through Google’s platform, this has the potential to eventually boost the price of Basic Attention Token. The more recognition that the token gets could have a great positive impact on BAT, however, only time will tell if these improvements to Braves platform will have a positive impact on the token. Simply put, the Google interface is very recognisable, which instantly gives Brave a new type of mainstream attraction - it’s easy to use and looks familiar. As a result of this, we can assume that more people will begin to use the Brave browser and as a result, more people will be encouraged to purchase BAT. With more people buying and earning BAT, we can assume that more people will be donating BAT. An increased flow of BAT will then in turn encourage a price climb and a climb in the tokens market cap. Furthermore, these upgrades, assuming they do reach a mainstream audience, will have a very positive impact on the value of BAT in the long run. Currently sitting on the 41 spot on Coinmarketcap’s Top 100 Cryptocurrencies with a price of $0.21, BAT is in the green at the moment with a 1.35% increase over the past day at the current time of writing. Remember that investment is risky and therefore if you do wish to invest in BAT on this premise, make sure you carry out further research. Whilst it looks promising, BAT is just as volatile as any other cryptocurrency and therefore, care should be taken. What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!