It has been a while since I last wrote a blog post here, mainly since like many others I got into the blockchain rabbit hole. As a result, I decided to create a new section in my blog that will deal only with apps, products, blockchains, decentralization and everything that is between these.

The first app that I would like to discuss about is the blockchain-based Browser “Brave”. I have been a Brave user for the past couple of months already and can say confidently that it has amazing speed and privacy features that are very different from what we got used to in the existing internet environment.

Wait a minute privacy? Why should I care about that?
As someone who is operating in the blockchain space for couple of years by now privacy is something that I have encountered discussed on for multiple times, however in the past this aspect of our free products were not an appreciated unique value proposition to consumers. Within this context, 2-3 years ago I used to have an exercise that I used to have with my employees as I taught them about blockchain in which we tried to quantify how much users will be willing to pay to keep their digital footprint private. The answer for that was repetitively a big 0 back then.
However that is changing in front of us nowadays, as we can see with the recent data privacy scandals at Facebook, Marriott and many others incidents. Such events increased the general public’s awareness to this topic and as our lives become more digital these will increase the products that will put a much larger emphasis on this topic moving forward. Some professionals claim that this process will take years to be finalized, maybe even an entire generation, however the beginning of that process is already here.

So how all of this relates to the Brave browser?
Brave which is based on the Google browser “Chrome” and is free to downlaod was developed with this approach in mind by blocking any web ads, pop-up ads and website trackers while you browse through the internet all while remember any site authentication information and keeping the Brave browser download free. This means no more amazon commercials that are chasing you through various websites or annoying ads that block you from viewing your content. As a result, as a user your browsing experience is much better and faster (2 times faster than chrome, Internet Explorer and firefox on desktops and up to 8 times faster on mobile in comparison to the mobile browser version of Chrome and the Safari explorer), exactly what you would expect from your browser.

Using Brave, users become much more anonymous to the advertisers and publishers which makes it harder for these organizations to map the users’ online and offline behavior to better target ads to them. In addition to that, in contrast to other browsers providers, the company do not store its users data on its own servers.
Finally, since Brave is based on the Chrome browser infrastructure, it supports some of its browser extensions (e.g. Metamask), plug-ins, add-ons and settings which makes the transition between the browsers easy and user friendly.

But how will website owners earn a living?
To ensure that publishers and website owners can survive, the Brave economy creator, Brendan Eich, who was also the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla, created monetary incentives to websites to create good content. The approach for that is that any user can donate BAT (Basic Attention Token – the cryptocurrency that is the basic unit of value in the Brave economy) to the websites he enjoys visiting based on his preference or based on the time he spends in each one of these websites.

With the same approach, users can also earn BATs by agreeing to receive ads from the publishers. Brave believes that this approach will align the incentives in the complicated online advertising world much better than currently where users’ data is being traded freely without compensation them in any way (check out this blog post to understand the current ecosystem).

BAT was also instrumental for Brave creation as that was the token that they have sold in their ICO and managed to raise $35M. Moving forward, the Brave foundation will use these tokens also to increase the adoption for the browser something that users are already eligible as part of the testing of the product.

So is it all so rosy?
As a new innovative product, not everything is frictionless with Brave. For example, it does not block ads within search results yet, so you will still have those appear in your Google search.
Also, some of the integrations with the Google Suite is not completely smooth as well (e.g. I cannot share my screen on Google hangouts) but these are all bug fixes that are common for a new product that offers such benefits and I am sure that the folks at Brave will be able to fix easily moving forward.

As a result of all of these I decided to convert my default web browser to Brave and using it for couple of months already, and apparently I am not the only one that did that : )

What about you? How is your experience using Brave? Do you like it like I do? Let me know your ideas below and subscribe for more insights!