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Episode

How BAT is Shaping the Future of Digital Advertising and the Attention Economy

Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software, discusses how Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) was conceived in 2017 to confront the inefficiencies of traditional digital advertising and the early hurdles with Bitcoin. He also shares how BAT now harnesses the Ethereum blockchain to create a privacy-centric and transparent ecosystem, fundamentally changing the way users, advertisers, and content creators engage with digital ads.

Transcript

Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API.

You’re listening to an episode of The Brave Technologist. And this week we’re going to do another solo episode. This time we’re going to cover the Basic Attention Token, otherwise known as the BAT. I’m going to give you a little bit of info today about what BAT’s all about, how it came to life, and how it’s grown, and where it’s going.

So let’s jump right in. So what is a BAT? That is a great follow on to the last solo episode we did where we went over the principal agent problem and how brave as a product stack basically brings this whole concept of [00:01:00] user first software to life. The next follow on you want to have that, especially when we’re talking about how we can monetize and bring business to it is, how do you build that on top of a solid user first ground?

And when we came up with a basic attention token, otherwise known as the bat back in 2017, it was specifically to try and take this idea that had become, you know, really started to take foot in the Ethereum community around how you could tokenize different use cases. Because initially when we had launched Brave, we started by integrating Bitcoin and having this Brave payment system where publishers could verify their domain with Brave and users of Brave could contribute Bitcoin.

They could buy Bitcoin through the browser. and then they could contribute their Bitcoin automatically to publishers, initially. The publishers had to go through a verification process with Brave to make sure that, you know, they were who they claimed they were. But that was initially kind of how we were going to start this, and we were also going [00:02:00] to, you know, introduce this idea of a user revenue share with advertising that was private and user first.

We, we found some, you know, Some sharp edges on that initially mainly around you know, there were issues where users wanted to buy a Bitcoin to contribute, but there were issues where fees were going up on Bitcoin. And all of a sudden you, you were in a situation where you almost had to like purchase 10 of Bitcoin to donate five, basically.

And we started to see how these Scaling issues were coming to life. And also, you know, the block new blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain are generated every 10 minutes. So if you’re trying to scale. A lot of transactions. It became very, very difficult to do in the state of play. And this was back in, you know, 2016.

And so we saw what Ethereum was doing with this idea of tokenizing different use cases and, and creating utility through tokens and the tokenization for different use cases. And we’d also run into a problem where. You know, while we do block third [00:03:00] party tracking in the browser, a lot of this tracking is intended to be used for accounting purposes you know, where two parties need to agree on something.

And one thing that was really novel and interesting about the blockchain use case was that here you could have a publicly verifiable ledger with, with consensus on chain so that, you know, it eliminated the need for My publisher to have one set of reporting and an agency to have another set of reporting and an ad server to have a third set of reporting and nobody really trusting each other’s reporting or you know, having discrepancies between these different types of reporting, et cetera.

So you’d end up with these, you know, pretty inaccurate or these pretty wide margins that you would have to, you know, Get everybody to agree on for the same event. Did that ad display in front of the user or did the user click on an ad, et cetera. So what we saw with what was happening on the Ethereum blockchain was this ability to have eventually tap into this, you know, on [00:04:00] chain ability to verify and validate the things were happening.

While also being able to have a specialized use case for attention and in a browser and the web where the attention economy currently lives. So it turned out to be a really both the timing the timing of this, where these token tokenized cases and these tokens started to be launched really lined up well with where we were going with the browser and, and with some of the issues we were encountering with the Bitcoin side of things.

So what we did was back in 2016, we started to work on. a white paper to kind of establish the case for for BAT. You can still see the white paper too. You can download it from basicattentiontoken. org. We have the white paper directly available on the website there. and we published that in, I believe it was March of 2017.

And whole process was kind of setting up the case. And, and the basic principles around the first use case for BAT was that You know, users should be getting a revenue share if they want it for their attention. A lot of people throw [00:05:00] out this meme that you know attention is, or data is the new oil.

Or, or, you know, trying to say that you know, Personal data is is kind of this fungible thing, which is not because personal data is personalized to you. What we do with that was basically say, Look, attention is fungible. My attention and your attention are, you know, human attention. It’s not specific to Luke’s data or Luke’s behavior.

on a chain or your own behavior. It’s specifically bringing this to this place of attention. And so with our model, the first use case that we wanted to go to market with was this ability to one serve and add privately. So there was technology that our team created around that. They engineered, designed, developed and brought out this way to actually, you know, leverage the browser because the browser knows what the user is doing locally.

And the way to think about this is that, you know, your browser history is your browser history. That’s what happens in your browser on your device. And my browser history is my browser history. And [00:06:00] instead of having it, when you go to a website now, where you know, outside of brave on, let’s say you go to cnn.

com a whole of companies are all collecting information about you based on that page visit and then are bidding on whether or not they are determining whether or not they want to bid on the opportunity to serve you an ad. and then they’re having to report. If they did serve the ad information about you, about what you did around that ad, et cetera these different parties are, are collecting that information and then rolling that up just so the advertiser can, and the publisher can see that this ad brought this value or this much engagement et cetera.

What we did with Brave was say, look, like the browser knows what the user is doing, both like the browser knows locally what the user has been doing as they’ve been browsing the web and also knows like what the user is currently doing now, whether they’re putting intent signals. Locally in the browser or, you know, are, browsing different types of content.

And so what we [00:07:00] decided to do at Brave is that we were going to actually, instead of having all these other companies collect and determine whether or not to serve you an ad, we’ll actually create a model where the browser has the ad selection happen directly on the user’s device. And then we’ll use zero knowledge reporting to anonymously account for.

That user’s engagement in their, in their attention without having to individually identify each user or their behavior, but we can aggregate that information and roll it up to the advertiser through the platform to show them what performance of the campaign was and, and, and account for that thing and then eventually get to the point where we could actually like report this activity on chain.

And have it be available for public, verification and also make it so that, you know, our accounting for, the ecosystem could be verified on chain. So it was really ambitious goal because not only did we have to come up with a way to serve ads privately had to be effective as well.

And it had to fit into this user first ethos, which means [00:08:00] that. We have to create a way to effectively serve an ad without in tracking that user individually and without leaking that user’s information to third parties or even directly to the advertiser. And so this required a lot of, you know, really really Smart engineering work that took place around like how we could classify content and intent signals locally on the browser and then also work around how to set up zero knowledge reporting so that we could anonymously account for these types of activities that are happening And then report them back without it individually identifying or linking to a specific user or what they were browsing Those are some pretty ambitious tasks that the team had to do and then, you know, for the user we were going to have the user would basically earn a revenue share.

And then wherever that ad was served, if it was served in the user’s browser from the browser level, That’s the, that’s ad slot is on the user’s [00:09:00] device in their client. So you know, 70 percent of that revenue would go to the user and then the platform would receive the 30 percent of the revenue from the advertiser.

So advertisers pay into the system, users get a revenue share and brave gets a revenue share. That was the initial model. And then the other part of that also involved publishers as well, where if the ad slot was on the publisher page, the publisher would get a rev share. The user would get a rev share.

And Brave would get a rev share off of, divide the pie into those three pieces. And there’s a lot of, you know, specifics~~ about, ~~a bunch of the economics around this are in, in the white paper. I’d encourage people to take a deeper dive into some of that as well.

But we did a really great job shoring up the problem around, you know, not just How complicated programmatic advertising was and still is, by the way how bad it is for users privacy. And then also how, you know, these incentives kind of create this environment for fraud to become rampant and all of these other things that advertisers have issues with and huge billions of dollars a year, 10 million a year.

I think 14 billion in 2017 or 2016 or something like that. And, and [00:10:00] the number just keeps growing every year, but digital advertising was a great area to initially go in with bat because it was a, we saw, I mean, I worked in digital advertising before coming to Brave and working on BAT, and it was something just like most technology where it grows exponentially, and it really, I mean, there’s a lot that digital advertising is enabled for the web to grow and proliferate, but also, you know, Over time, what ended up happening was that there’s this complete lack of regard for what this meant to users and their privacy on and it got to the point where, and I don’t think that people necessarily.

proliferating this way, but not only is your home computer connected to your identity, but your phone now you have appliances in your house, you have the auto you know, your car, other types of devices are all collecting and feeding information back to servers. And so, There really went from having a single cookie or a couple of cookies on a [00:11:00] website on a device and having different things not necessarily connected to each other.

All of a sudden, having everything sinking to a single identifier and then having other services also make their own versions of you and then having things think across that. So it went from. pretty low levels of privacy invasion to absolute dragnet on user privacy. And it was something where it scaled so quickly that, know, it wasn’t necessarily malicious.

It just was something where privacy was kind of an afterthought. And one of the reasons why I personally wanted to get out of that space and work at Brave was that it was the first opportunity I had seen to not just try to make something more private, but try to make a business model that was more private, try to make a way for the web to grow that would work and, and have the proper incentives and, and include users.

And so that’s really, you know, the, the initial crust of what we were doing with that, but that’s not limited to an advertising use case. It was just the first one we went to market with. And so we created the white paper. We, we [00:12:00] went out at the time they were doing a lot of these token launches.

Ours was scheduled on May 31st 2017. And it wasn’t a particular time you were, you kind of were doing it on a block on the blockchain and the way that the launch wind was, you know, if you had a theorem it was first come first serve and we managed to, we were putting we generate 1. 5 billion bat. That’s the total supply of the token. And of that 1. 5 billion we were at the token launch we put a billion of those tokens up for people to purchase at the launch. And the rest of the f The 500 million were divided into two pools.

One was a developer pool that became unlocked six months after the token launch. And then the rest of it was also in a a user growth pool which was there for the platform. So one example of this was, you know, we had a referral program where. Creators could go and get people to use Brave and qualifying users would if they brought users on that, you know, [00:13:00] stuck with Brave, we would reward on those referrals, like an affiliate or referral program for creators.

And we helped grow a lot of creators that way. So when the token was launched fast forward about six months and by the way, the token lunch was, kind of a special day. we managed to raise I think it was over 36 million in notional dollar value and in about 30 seconds on day, it was one of the fastest launches that took place and it was quite a memorable event.

But within six months of our token launch, so by October. of 2017, we had actually replaced Bitcoin Brave payments with the basic attention token, BAT. And we had so that publishers that had already Verified with the brave payment system could accept that through bat mercury phase when we kind of set it up is like similar to, you know, mercury, Gemini and Apollo on our road map.

And that first phase was kind of, you know, Transitioning from this Bitcoin proof of concept system to bat and kind of starting [00:14:00] as the basis where you know, publishers initially is web publishers verified and users could automatically contribute or go in and, you know change. We, I think we had sliders at the time where you could go and slide the dials You know to donate certain percentage of or contribute certain percentages of the bat that you had for the sites that you visited to those creators and at the end of the month, the browser would locally aggregate that using at the time we’re using the anonymized ZK library with the browser which would work kind of like double blinded voting and it would aggregate up all of your attention and then contribute it out to the creators that you visited.

But it was also an interesting time because. While we transition to bat in that Mercury phase you started to see a lot of content creators on YouTube and on other platforms getting demonetized. So, they would basically would change the rules around content creators having to reach a certain amount of views before they could monetize things.

That was kind of the first phase of what we were observing. And then, you know, they [00:15:00] started to more aggressively go after, you know, certain types of content would no longer get monetized, et cetera. And it went from kind of applying to certain verticals and certain types of content to now, where do you see it, where it’s kind of gone across the board.

So what we started to do early is say, look, like. attention economy is changing. It’s no longer just about Publishers a lot of content is getting created not only by publishers, but also by content creators on YouTube, on Reddit, on GitHub, even, you know, open source code maintainers and, publishers and Vimeo and Twitch.

And so we started to add OAuth 3. 0. Support so that, you know, creators on those platforms could also earn. And while this was happening the timing was just right. We started to really really grow. We put some incentives using the growth pool out there for content creators to onboard and then we would reward them out with that.

You can see there’s blogs that we, put on the brave. com website for some of these growth programs. And while this was happening the team was engineering the ads platform kind of in [00:16:00] the background. and there was a ton of work that went into that, but the whole thing started by us just kind of getting a lot of those content creators on.

And we also saw that, you know, as we started to grow this YouTube content creators started to like verify with our platform, started to help us grow Brave, and we were able to utilize that to help grow the platform through this kind of mission driven stance that we had. And a lot of people started to learn about that that way.

Meanwhile, we’re building the ad platform to try and kind of close the loop build that reward model into place. And so what we started to do to to bootstrap the platform to one, like kind of show that content creators could use brave as a way to earn was we started to do Grants to users with that from that user growth pool.

So if a user was in the browser we would grant them that, and then that user could automatically contribute that to those content creators that they viewed over the month. And then we also integrated tipping into the browser as well. So [00:17:00] that in addition to automatically contributing to content creators as they browsed, they could also tip to them.

And then we tweak the model a bit too, to make it so that, you know, verified content creators were the ones that would get the earnings, et cetera. Over time, things just kind of naturally evolved as we heard. You know, listen to feedback from creators, listen to feedback from users, et cetera. But we were hearing, look like we want to be able to, you know, independently tip in addition to automatically contributing, et cetera.

So a lot of things were worked on with Brave Rewards while the ad platform was getting built and the ad platform was a lot of work because we had to kind of come up with a way to to serve these ads locally and, the way it roughly works. And there’s more information, you know, the specifics, but.

And in a nutshell, you know, there’s a catalog of available ads to serve to different categories that’s downloaded to the browser depending on where the user is located. And then, you know, the browser then knows, okay, these are the ads that are available for the categories, and then as the user is browsing if the user’s opted in to see ads, because we, [00:18:00] users that want to earn have to opt in to, to earn, and also to view the notification unit that we had in the browser that The ads are serving through as the user’s browsing.

So let’s say you’re looking, you’re researching you know a specific car or as you, the content registers is more and more related to somebody that’s on a path to research or to buy a car. The browser would say, okay, cool. I have a Chevy or Ford ad, and I will serve that ad to the user.

So a lot of work went into that model. And in early 2019, January, we launched our first developer channel preview of brave ads and gave was the first opportunity for users to actually earn that from the ecosystem or from advertisers with their attention in the ecosystem, and then could automatically contribute or tip it up to creators as they browse the web.

And kind of closed that loop initially and then we did a broader release to The release channel for everybody in Brave on desktop initially in April of 2019. So, the timeline [00:19:00] goes from, you know, May of 2017 was the launch of BAT, and by October of 2017 we had integrated the token to the browser.

And we were a rare instance of a project that actually had a product when we did a token launch. So, a lot of these. Tokens that were getting launched were simply white papers that had not created a product yet. Brave was a bit of a different case where we actually had a product, a working product on different operating systems when we launched a token.

So we launched BAT we launched the ad platform and it was off to the races. One of the things that we did early on if you rewind to April of 2019 it was at a time, you know, earlier time in the crypto space. Web3 wasn’t really an established thing as Web3 yet, but everybody was talking about it in the context of cryptocurrency or tokens or You know, blockchain related businesses, basically, or projects.

And at the time Google, Facebook I think it was either SurveyMonkey or MailChimp, one of those two, all these major [00:20:00] platforms that had advertising or, or marketing capabilities had either severely prohibited or restricted ability for blockchain or crypto related projects to advertise.

And so we took a different approach. We basically said, look, like. We have this token we have utility with that in our use case and we have an advertising platform. So we’re going to go and allow welcome, you know blockchain and crypto related advertisers. And we did some vetting, of course, diligence around that.

But, you know, A lot of things had to come into place. And I think it’s something that kind of we were a bit early, but it’s something that’s kind of underrated. In the broader space is the fact that, you know, we had a functional crypto utility with the bat in 2017, and then fully looped in 2019 to where, you know, it had, you had this scenario where users were earning 70 percent of the revenue share with their attention and then the ability to pay that forward to content creators in this new way to kind of monetize on the web and support the creation of content [00:21:00] and kind of create this new way, a new model that, you know, factored built on privacy, built on user first, et cetera.

and so we grew from there. I mean, at the time when we launched, we were at about 5 million monthly active users and brave and users had to opt in to view ads with Brave ads to earn. And since then, I mean, within, I think, six or seven months of that, we had gone from 5 million to 10 million monthly active users.

We introduced a second ad unit where it displayed for all users in brave. They could turn it off if they wanted, but users that were opted in could actually earn from that unit as well. But it was a way for users to get a revenue share with their attention of the ad. The ads that they viewed, which again, it’s fits right into this user first attention economy that we’re aiming to build with brave.

But the cool thing about it is that, you know, this is was in the white paper is bat wasn’t intended to only live in the brave ecosystem. The bad ecosystem that is at ERC 20 token on aetherium, which means that Any developer could [00:22:00] integrate that and what we started to see that was very cool was we started to see with the rise of DeFi decentralized finance in 2019, we started to see MakerDAO.

Aave and Compound, which were early DeFi protocols, integrating BAT as a token in DeFi. Like, we didn’t have any hand in this. This just started, started to happen organically. And then BAT started to be one of those early tokens that was integrated into the DeFi utility. Which was very cool.

We started to see other things happen too, over time, like web three gaming and NFT minting and things like that, where people were able to utilize ERC 20 tokens on Ethereum in some of these decentralized applications for bat to have that took place outside of. Brave and outside of our ecosystem with the brave product stack, which was super cool.

And so you know, we, we saw those opportunities come up. We also were able to see some of these dApps advertise and brave and grow their audiences as well. But that’s the really cool thing about this being a token outside of brave [00:23:00] ecosystem is that it can be adopted elsewhere. And even since then we’ve seen the emergence of, you know, Additional blockchains where you could wrap tokens and, and bridge them or bridge and wrap them and, bring them to other blockchains.

And so BAT has even, you know, gone cross chain. So BAT has gone to finance Smart Chain, or BNB chain now. It’s on Solana Polygon avalanche. Other blockchains have started to utilize back. And it’s been really cool to see it go off. But BAT is not intended to be only living on one blockchain or only living in the Brave browser.

Attention is fungible and it is not confined to a single blockchain. And so is intended to be this unit of account for attention that’s supposed to live, you know, wherever there are that will support it. And so through bridges like wormhole and, others we’ve seen that actually go cross chain, which has been awesome.

and you know, that if you fast forward to now, I mean, we’ve gone from 5 million monthly active users when we launched to, almost over 70 million monthly active [00:24:00] users. and. One of those challenges with that too is that, you know, we had to make a system where advertisers and content creators could all come together on board into this system without having to understand all of the nuts and bolts around in order to participate.

And it required a lot of work in order to do that. But we’ve seen, we’ve had advertisers from Intel, Ford you know I think QuickBooks and we’ve had other major advertisers onboarded. And run ads with brave that have utilized that and numbers keep growing and growing and creators, you know, we’ve wikipedia We’ve got mr.

Beast is a verified creator bart baker phil defranco a lot of large creators have verified, to accept that Through brave and from our user base and, we’ve also released last year the ability for, uh, it’s a research paper called Boomerang, and it it’s a way that we’re able to take what we built with brave rewards and decentralize it and be able to handle the computation of the analytics and the reporting doing it on chain so that it fully can more [00:25:00] decentralize the brave rewards ecosystem, but also be an open source model for.

Other people to do private attestation and reporting of events. So you can think about things from fitness apps to there’s three to four different use cases in that research paper which we have from our boomerang blog on our brave website that are out there for other research teams put out there for other projects look at and explore.

And we’re excited to see, as time comes. That project come to life and more back get adopted with boomerang in other applications as well. But also, you know, there are a lot of depth that have integrated that already. And we’re going to be integrating that into more depth as we go forward as well.

And working with those developers that wish to integrate that in there as well. But this also doesn’t happen without having a very strong back community. So some things we’re working on now are the ability to pay with that. Advertisers can currently pay with that through brave’s ad system through our self serve interface and through managed services.

So Advertisers can buy campaigns with that or if advertisers buy campaigns with [00:26:00] dollars Brave actually buys that off the market and then posts on brave. com slash transparency or basic attention token org slash Growth on either, both of those domains, we publish when we buy a bat off the market for that 70 percent of user rev share that we distribute back to users.

And so, you know, all this is in the spirit of transparency and showing where the ad campaigns are running showing things like on chain holder counts as well, et cetera. Because that’s 1 other thing, as, you know, when we launched that there were only a couple thousand tokens on the market.

Then we saw it hit over 5,000 tokens on cryptocurrencies on the market to now in, 20 24. You have you know, the first. four months of the year, over 540, 000 cryptocurrencies were created in this mean coin in, in broader phases. And through all of that, BAT has maintained its position as the 12th most distributed token on Ethereum by on chain holders.

That doesn’t [00:27:00] account for sub counts on on exchanges et cetera. And so that’s one thing that’s really been amazing is that you know, despite what happens with volume or price or whatever, the, holder counts have stayed and, people that are, you know, have a lot of conviction in this ecosystem and we’re excited to see it grow.

And I think, you know, we’ve also seen I mentioned earlier how out of that 1. 5 billion tokens that were generated 1 billion were put up and then we had the, this growth in the dev pool. We’re at a part point now where over 99 percent of the tokens that have been generated are in circulation.

So that user growth pool has gotten smaller and smaller to the point where almost all of the bad is in circulation. And so it was one of those things to think about. As people opt for having privacy with their browsing and moving with their feet to this ecosystem with Brave and BAT BAT itself becomes more fractional and more adopted, right?

And the thing that really gets me excited here is the potential where you have, not a [00:28:00] small cohort that’s addressable here, right? Brave has the potential to go after, you know, the user base in any browser. But if you look at just Chrome by itself, there’s over 3. 2 billion users on the Chrome browser.

And so, you know, there’s 1. 5 billion bad in existence 3. 2 over 2. 2 billion users on chrome alone. And so it’s pretty exciting when you think about it, you know, in the future, you could have a scenario where there’s just way more users than there are whole bats in the market, which is, it’s pretty, it’s pretty cool.

There’s the potential here for bat to become a ubiquitous attention unit of account for attention for advertising, but also for gaming. For NFT minting, which we’ve done through our community and have done with other platforms for the ability to add a quest on where users are going through and engaging in deeper events with, advertisers and creators and getting additional rewards for them for the ability to eventually, you know, integrate this in with e commerce making it so that you can pay for [00:29:00] AI services with, that making it so that you have this digital It doesn’t matter where you are, right?

Like you don’t have to think about it in terms of dollars or dinars or, you know, rubles even, or anything. you can factor it in as attention tokens, right? And it kind of makes this whole world of Web3 And in this digital space, fungible unit for that, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to eat into your network token so you don’t have to go after your Bitcoin or your Ethereum or your Solana or your Cardano or your Polkadot or, you know, any of the other assets that you’re holding.

You have this ability to have this fungible unit. And the other beautiful thing about it is that, you know, we’ve had over 10 million people have onboarded with Brave Rewards and earned BAT since we brought it out. And when you think about it it is a rare thing where a lot of people have been introduced to crypto through Brave.

A lot of people have earned BAT. Earned their first crypto through brave by earning bat through the brave reward system. And we’re really excited right now. [00:30:00] This year, we did the first on chain settlement. So users that have self custody wallets can actually start to settle bad on chain directly.

It’s a big step for us because before we were limited by high transaction fees on Ethereum and, and now with the emergence of L2s, but also with the emergence of other L1s like Solana, we can actually settle on chain directly to self custody users. So over this year, we’re going to be opening that up for more and more.

We have it kind of in this first cohorts of early adopters, but the whole plan is to, as the year goes on, brought in that addressable rewards user base to be able to have it so that everybody that wants to settle to self custody can do so on Solana at first and then onto other blockchains as well.

Because we, we see this as a multi chain present and future and having access to different blockchains is what Brave and BraveWallet’s all about and giving users that choice. The ability to select where they want to settle is something that we’re excited to bring to [00:31:00] users. So I think if you look at this potential here, you know, there, there really is no other use case where you have this big of a potential addressable audience and this much moving machinery that’s proven for years.

And not only proven, but also has some of the biggest brands in the world that are using this software. And that’s one of those things where it’s kind of an interesting challenge. And this space. Somebody that’s, you know, on a team of just really, really smart people that are working really hard to bring us to as many people as possible.

You’re kind of in this dilemma of like you have traders and token holders that always want to be chasing the latest thing, and we can bring value to that. Right. done this with gaming. We’ve done this with NFTs. We’ve done this with now we’ve done this with even Mean Coins where if Mean Coins doing something interesting, you know, we’ve been advertising those out to users and, making crypto users aware of those things leveraging the technology that we’ve built that has crypto utility to do that.

But I think, you know, there is a challenge to have, like, sometimes, you know, people think about [00:32:00] us as like an old dog, right? Or as something that’s been around and might be boring. But that’s kind of one of the beautiful things about what we’re doing is that we built a stable technology that uses crypto that your neighbor can use and understand.

I’m using the browser. I’m earning with my attention. I’m receiving ~~ an award. I’m receiving~~ reward. For with my attention. And I’m a participant in something that puts my privacy first. And that gives me agency to you know, support content creators on this web that we all enjoy. It’s a beautiful thing, and we look forward to bringing it to other use cases as well.

And to be, you know, bringing it forward into the world as well. And so, I’ve talked a lot about that today, but I think, you know, it’s really easy to give it a shot. I think you can go on to brave enable brave rewards and start participating with today. And we’re excited to continue to grow brave and bat into the future and have this.

ubiquitous attention token available and accessible to everybody. So if you’re looking forward to [00:33:00] this future or you want to learn more, you can go to basic attention token. org. There’s a white paper there. If you go to basic attention, token. org slash growth, you can see the transparency that we post online around that and around You know, our, bat purchases.

You can also go to brave. com slash transparency. We have the attention token count on X at attention token. We also have the bat community bat underscore community accounts on X. I encourage you all to follow both of those. And we host a bat community call every Tuesday at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern on brave talk.

We post those links on Twitter. And we do weekly. Love to have you all get involved and and learn more about BAT. And as always, my accounts my DMs are open on my, ex account just at Luke Malks. If anybody has any questions that they want to come directly to me with or to the broader Brave and BAT team.

And I hope you learned a lot today about BAT. And Yeah. The best way to get familiar is to just jump right in. And hope you all want to take part in and help us grow this token [00:34:00] and economy out. So we can go from, you know, 70 million to a hundred million to a billion. Thank you all. Hope you enjoyed this and we’ll be back with next episode of the brave technologist very soon. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the Brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave. com. And start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately.

Brave also shields you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff following you across the web.

Show Notes

In this episode of The Brave Technologist Podcast, we discuss:

  • The basic principles around the first use case for BAT
  • Strategic initiatives that propelled BAT’s expansion, including the referral programs for content creators
  • BAT’s growing utility across DeFi protocols, Web3 gaming, and NFT minting
  • Influential partnerships with brands like Intel, Ford, and creators like Mr. Beast

Guest List

The amazing cast and crew:

  • Luke Mulks - Vice President of Business Operations at Brave Software

    Luke Mulks is the Vice President of Business Operations at Brave Software, where he helps lead the company’s privacy-focused advertising and Web3 initiatives. Since joining in 2016, he’s played a key role in launching Brave Ads and expanding the Basic Attention Token (BAT) ecosystem. A former ad tech executive and media producer, Luke also hosts The Brave Technologist podcast, making emerging tech like AI and blockchain more accessible.

About the Show

Shedding light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!
Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.