Today we’re pleased to announce that the first phase of BAT Mercury is complete, four and half months after our token sale. BAT integration into Brave 0.19 makes the Brave browser the first application on the BAT platform.
The Brave Payments system (which anonymously and automatically supports a user’s favorite websites) now has an integrated BAT wallet. Contributions, monthly budgets, and account balances of wallets are now denominated in BAT.
BAT Mercury benefits both Brave users and publishers by making it easier to support content and collect contributions:
- Brave users can now easily add funds to their BAT wallets by making a transfer via a variety of currencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum) or BAT to their wallet address. No registration is required. Users can also fund their BAT wallets by converting fiat into BAT. They can do so by creating an account with our partner Uphold or with other exchanges.
Brave users who were previously using Brave Payments with the Bitcoin proof-of-concept system simply need to upgrade to Brave 0.19 when prompted. A new Brave BAT wallet will automatically be created for them. If there’s a balance in an existing Brave wallet, the browser will transfer the balance to the equivalent amount of BAT in the new Brave wallet (this may take up to an hour to complete in certain cases).
- Brave-verified publishers (or publishers planning to verify as Brave publishers) can start collecting their contributions after establishing an Uphold account. BAT contributions are automatically converted to fiat and are directly deposited into the publisher’s bank account. We expect this streamlined process to help reward even more content creators. The accessibility of BAT enhances its utility within the digital advertising and services platform that we are building.
In this initial Mercury release phase, wallets are unidirectional. Unidirectional wallet flow allows for secure and anonymous contributions to favorite sites. A future version will allow users to transfer BAT out of the wallet. Users will also soon be able to fund their BAT wallets with credit cards.
The BAT wallet integration into Brave’s anonymized system for distributing donations to publishers will be followed over the coming months by User Growth Pool (UGP) grants to users, further development and implementation of the Basic Attention Metric (BAM) system to include additional ad-related engagement metrics, and revenue share to users.
We look forward to expanding BAT to radically improve the efficiency of digital advertising and services to benefit publishers, advertisers, and users.
