What Is Basic Attention Token?

The Basic Attention Token is the new token for the digital advertising industry. It pays publishers for their content and users for their attention, while providing advertisers with more in return for their ads.

Digital advertising is broken. It is a market filled with middlemen and fraudsters, hurting users, publishers and advertisers. The Basic Attention Token (BAT) was developed to address this. BAT, an ERC20 token built on top of Ethereum, will be the token of utility in a new, decentralized, open source and efficient blockchain-based digital advertising platform.

In the ecosystem, advertisers will give publishers BATs based on the measured attention of users. Users will also receive some BATs for participating. They can donate them back to publishers or use them on the platform. This transparent system keeps user data private while delivering fewer but more relevant ads. Publishers experience less fraud while increasing their percentage of rewards. And advertisers get better reporting and performance.

The first part of the solution, the Brave browser, is already operational. Brave is a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks ads and trackers, and contains a ledger system that anonymously measures user attention aggregate to accurately reward publishers.

Download Brave now and experience the first phase of the BAT ecosystem through Brave's publisher contribution solution.

Basic Attention Token. It is a utility token based on the Ethereum technology that can also be used as a unit of account between advertisers, publishers, and users in a new, blockchain-based digital advertising and services platform. The token is not a digital currency, security or a commodity.

BAT is a utility token meant for use in the BAT platform. It is transferable. While we are aware that the token is currently being traded on the exchanges listed here, we have not encouraged or facilitated this exchange trading in any way. We have provided the foregoing information solely as a means of reducing the inquiries we receive directly.

The utility tokens are intended for use on the BAT platform, a new Blockchain-based digital advertising and services platform. Ownership of the tokens carry no rights other than the right to use them as a means to obtain services on the BAT platform, and to enable usage of and interaction with the platform, if successfully completed and deployed.

The tokens do not represent or confer any ownership right or stake, share or security or equivalent rights, or any right to receive future revenue shares, intellectual property rights or any other form of participation in or relating to the BAT platform, and/or Brave and its affiliates. The tokens are not refundable and are not intended to be a digital currency, security, commodity or any other kind of financial instrument.

BAT is not a digital currency, it is a utility token. It can be used as a unit of account between advertisers, publishers, and users on the BAT platform, and can be utilized to directly measure, exchange, and verify attention. Bitcoin would not enable this distinct, in-platform problem solving. Also, an integral part of the token sale was the creation of the BAT user growth pool (UGP) of 300 million tokens, which will be used to incentivize users to join the BAT platform. Finally, using BAT on Ethereum allows for faster scalability than using Bitcoin.

Getting Started With Basic Attention Token

An integral part of the token sale is the creation of a user growth pool of 300 million tokens. These tokens will be used to incentivize users to join the BAT platform. We anticipate that when users download the Brave browser they will be rewarded with tokens. The final number is not yet determined. Potentially, this could prompt tens of millions of users to join.

Once in the system, users will be able to obtain services and gain and spend BAT in a number of different scenarios. Users will be able to use tokens in exchange for premium content from publishers. Users will also be able to donate tokens to publishers. The Brave browser already has a donation system in beta. Publishers could also incentivize users to download their app with BAT. We are confident there are many other services and use cases that will surface as the ecosystem comes to life.

Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain.

The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.

The Challenge

Digital advertising is overrun by middlemen, trackers and fraud.

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, ransom-ware) 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.

Blockchain Digital Advertising

Stage 1: Brave Browser - Brave is a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks malvertisements, trackers, and contains a ledger system that anonymously captures user attention to accurately reward publishers.

Stage 2: Basic Attention Token - The Basic Attention Token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform, as it is exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users.

The token’s utility is derived from — or denominated by — user attention.

Attention is really just focused mental engagement — on an advertisement, in this case.

Stages 1 + 2 = A New Deal - The Brave browser knows where users spend their time, making it the perfect tool to calculate and reward publishers with BATs. This service creates a transparent and efficient Blockchain-based digital advertising market. Publishers receive more revenue because middlemen and fraud are reduced. Users, who opt in, receive fewer but better targeted ads that are less prone to malware. And advertisers get better data on their spending.

How It Works

The Brave browser anonymously monitors user attention, then rewards publishers accordingly with BATs.

Measuring Attention - Attention is measured as users view ads and content in the browser’s active tab in real time. The Attention Value for the ad will be calculated based on incremental duration and pixels in view in proportion to relevant content, prior to any direct engagement with the ad. We will define further anonymous cost-per-action models as the system develops.

Ads are then anonymously matched with customer interests using local machine learning algorithms. This means less irrelevant ads.

Brave will work with publishers and advertisers to establish best practices for judging user attention. One potential metric: the number of total views of advertising content for a certain number of seconds. Or, points assigned on the length of a view.

Who Gets What? - Users viewing ads will be rewarded with BATs. BATs can be used for premium content or services on the Brave platform.

Publishers will, as part of this service, receive the lion’s share of the total ad revenue. We anticipate that users will also donate back some tokens to publishers, further increasing their revenue.

More Privacy, Less Fraud - We plan to mitigate possible ad fraud through the use of cryptography, better client-side integrity, and transparency achieved through open source.

Parts of the Solution are Code Complete - Much of the infrastructure required to deploy BAT at the back end is “code complete,” meaning it’s currently in place and being used to distribute donations to publishers based on customer attention. Use it today in the Brave Browser for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

In January, we announced that we’d distribute $1 million worth of promotional BAT (Basic Attention Token) via user grants to Brave desktop browser wallets — ultimately to be contributed to website publishers and YouTube creators via Brave Payments.

Today we allocated that $1 million worth of BAT to a total of 52,829 website publishers and YouTube creators. If you operate a website or YouTube channel, you can go to https://publishers.basicattentiontoken.org and claim your BAT if it was awarded to you. Even if you haven’t previously registered, any BAT you earned will be waiting to be claimed, once you verify ownership of your site or YouTube channel. There are currently over 11,000 verified Brave publishers and creators, so we’re happy to see this program reward sites well beyond our current ecosystem, as Brave users take advantage of the ease-of-use of Brave Payments.

We applied a multi-step process designed to help detect and filter out fraudulent claims of our BAT grants. Also, given the much larger scale at which this promotion ran (compared to our original $50,000 December promotion), various bugs and edge cases surfaced that incorrectly pushed back contribution dates, or in some cases resulted in other unexpected contribution reporting issues.

While such issues are to be expected when bringing up a platform such as BAT, we’re already working to address these as we refine Brave Payments. As we scale up, we are making improvements along every dimension of the system, both to improve reliability and to make actual behavior match expected behavior, all while ensuring our commitment to privacy.

We’re thrilled to see the Brave platform at use to reward favorite sites and creators, and to reconnect publishers with their audience. We look forward to seeing all the rewarded recipients claim the $1M worth of BAT so they can keep creating more content. We’ll have more grants of this nature from our user growth pool in the future to help reward creators for their content and to improve everyone’s web experience, as BAT’s utility increases.

As part of our effort to make the Basic Attention Token platform even more efficient and easy to use for our thousands of verified sites and content creators, we recently upgraded our Publishers website to allow a single publisher account to manage multiple properties.

This new functionality means that content creators that use Brave Payments to monetize their content can now manage multiple properties (where “property” is defined as a web site or a YouTube channel) with one email address. Previously, a creator needed to create many accounts, one per property.

Many of you requested this multi-property/single-owner feature and we’d like to outline its key aspects so you can see how this benefits you:

Previously:

• Publishers accounts had exactly one property each.
• To manage multiple properties you had to create separate Publishers accounts for each property. This proved cumbersome for publishers with many properties.
• Login was done by entering the web domain and clicking a link in an email; or else logging in with Google (YouTube).

Going forward:

• Email addresses are now unique per account.
• A single account can have many properties.
• Login is done by entering the account email address and clicking a link in an email.

To match the new workflow, we’ve consolidated existing accounts by email address.

How this might affect you:

• If you have only one account with a website, this won’t affect you.
• If you have many accounts under the same email, you now have a single account.
• If you have many accounts under different emails, you will continue to have multiple accounts, one per email.
• If you have two-factor authentication enabled, it will remain.

New Dashboard for Brave Payments: Multiple Properties At-A-Glance

How To Get A Basic Attention Token Wallet?

With the recent announcement that Brave Wallets can now be used to support your favorite YouTube Creators (as well as bloggers, and more), there have been a few questions about how a user funds their wallet. It is our aim to make that process clear in this short guide.

First, Create a Wallet

Before you can fund a wallet, you’ll need a wallet. Let’s start by opening the Preferences window in Brave. This is available via the browser menu (⋮), or by navigating to about:preferences in the address bar.

Select Brave Payments on the left navigation panel, and toggle payments On. Your wallet will be created automatically at this point; this could take a few minutes. Once you have your wallet, you should see an Add Funds button — lets go ahead and push that!

Already own some coins?

If you’re familiar with the world of cryptocurrencies, you likely already have some ETH or BTC laying around somewhere. If that’s the case, you’re only seconds away from funding your wallet!

First, decide which token you’d like to use — I’ll assume you’re using ETH for the sake of this guide. To get the ETH address of your wallet, click the ETH button in Brave Payments.

Copy the ETH address for your Brave Wallet, and initiate your transaction. Once processed, the ETH will be converted to BAT and deposited into your wallet. This process should take no more than a few minutes.

New to the world of crypto coins?

What about those who are new to this, and don’t know what cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and hashes are? No need to be worried, our partners at Uphold have created a very user-friendly experience.

Head over to Uphold.com and create an account. Once you’ve done this, you’ll see that they offer a few different cards — we’ll use the BAT card. If you don’t already have a BAT card, click View All Cards and favorite the BAT card.

At this point, you can proceed to use the Uphold service to add funds to your BAT card via a bank account, or by using a credit/debit card. For this, Uphold will require that you verify your identity (you’ll submit a few photos with your webcam of your face and ID, as well as provide a TIN or SSN. The process takes about 5 minutes).

Once you have added funds to your BAT card in Uphold, you can return to Brave Payments in the Brave Browser. Select Add Funds, and then select BAT. This will reveal the BAT Address for your Brave Wallet. Copy this address and return to Uphold.com.

From your BAT card on Uphold, select Use Funds, and send to Cryptocurrency or Utility Token. Lastly, we’ll paste-in the BAT wallet address that we copied from Brave Payments, fill out the rest of the form, and submit.

After this transaction has completed, and Uphold has performed any needed conversions, you’ll see a positive balance in the Brave Payments tab of Brave.

Future Improvements

This process currently requires a few steps, but you can expect further simplification in future versions of Brave.

Basic Attention Token Resources

• Official Website
• Medium
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Rocket
• TME

How To Buy Basic Attention Token?

Brendan Eich, the inventor of internet game-changers like JavaScript, Netscape Navigator (RIP), and Mozilla Firefox, developed the concept of the Basic Attention Token, or BAT, in conjunction with a new form of internet browser called Brave. He has observed the evolution of the internet into a platform for rampant spamming, badly targeted ads, and ad trackers that piggyback off of user bandwidth, costing users money they never agreed to spend to be marketed to.

The Brave browser returns users to a purer and faster online experience by automatically blocking all ads. In order to publish sponsored content on Brave, publishers must complete a verification process agreeing to Brave’s terms and conditions. Even then, Brave users can choose whether or not they see sponsored content from these verified publishers.

This is where the Basic Attention Token comes into play. The token is delineated by, and therefore itself defines, the value of consumer/user attention. If publishers create content that multiple users are interested in watching, interacting with, or reading, they are earning ‘basic attention.’ The token being a measure of that attention, publishers are rewarded with BAT when their content performs well and is useful to users.

On the other end of the spectrum, users can also be rewarded in BAT for giving publishers their attention and the ability to market directly to them through the Brave browser, should they choose to turn on that feature. Users can then either hang on to the BAT they accumulate in their BAT Wallets, or can subsequently use their BAT to reward publishers for content they enjoy and would like to support.

In short, the Brave browser and the Basic Attention Token create a rewards-based marketing system in which meaningful relationships can be created between publisher and user through anonymous and private interactions that involve actual exchange of value defined by the user. Users can promote content on behalf of publishers and reap the rewards, just as publishers reap the rewards of interested users. Publishers can even publish premium content available through BAT payment. It’s a more democratic, one-to-one world on Brave, and it promises to have a huge impact on internet use.

Where To Spend Basic Attention Token?

We are building the BAT platform to integrate the Brave browser (see below), Brave’s ledger system, as well as a BAT wallet and related blockchain-attested functionality. The utility token is for conducting transactions and obtaining services on the platform. The token will be used, for example, in acquiring ad slots to be filled with privately matched, anonymously confirmed ads.

Given the open-source nature of the project, however, we also envision that as we develop the BAT protocol, third-party developers may come up with new and novel uses for the token.

Some of these could include:

• Other browsers: One obvious use case for the token is for it to be used inside other browsers. This means that the BAT ecosystem will extend out to anyone using any of the current popular browsers.
• Telegram bot: In messaging apps like Telegram, we foresee the possibility of users being paid in BAT to view one ad.
• WeChat official account: WeChat has become a robust system of bots, payments, and other solutions. We foresee the creation of different WeChat solutions integrating the the token.
• Token and Status: The BAT also has attention-based applicability inside the Ethereum-based messaging/payment platforms such as Coinbase’s new Token app and Status app.

These apps must be fraud-resistant if they are to participate.

Latest Basic Attention Token News

What are the VAT/GST implications of my voluntary contribution?

At this time Brave does not believe the voluntary contributions are subject to VAT/GST, on the basis that they represent pure donations and are not linked to any benefits being derived by the voluntary contributor or another third party. The Brave browser gives all users exactly the same level of experience, regardless of whether such users are voluntary contributors to publishers.

However, as provided in the Brave Payments Contributor Terms of Service, you are responsible for determining what, if any, taxes apply to your voluntary contributions. You are also responsible for withholding, collecting, reporting and remitting the correct taxes, if any, to the appropriate tax authorities. You may wish to consult a tax advisor regarding these issues.