
The BAT system will only take off if lots of sites take advantage of what it offers: ad-free content support and letting the users earn by giving their attention to a site's advertisements. It sports some unique features, too: Ad blocking and web tracking protection are built in, its private browsing mode can hide your traffic using Tor, it includes a built-in BitTorrent utility, and it offers a cryptocurrency wallet.

What Is Brave?īrave, just like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi, is based on Google's open-source Chromium browser code, so it's compatible, fast, and familiar. Will it catch on? It's hard to say, but shifting the power (and some of the money involved) into the hands of users is an attractive idea. News and information sites like this one-and their readers-particularly stand to benefit from the concept. One of their goals is to fundamentally change the way websites make money, using the BAT (Basic Attention Token) cryptocurrency, based on the Ethereum blockchain. Brave's makers aren't just interested in the privacy side of the equation, however.

That largely means preventing advertisers from tracking you, which disrupts the main way many websites make money.

