Earlier this year the Brave team announced they were partnering with Solana for their built-in crypto wallet. In July they finally launched the desktop version of it for users and since then they have really really been rolling out the features and partnerships.
In June Brave announced the creation of their Wallet Partner Program which served to help easily onboard wallet users to Web3. Participants of this program spanned 10 blockchain networks and after six were announced with the launch of the program it would have made some sense to see further announcements die down. If anything though the opposite has happened and Brave's team has put the peddle to the metal.
July had an additional six wallet partners join with several names I am pretty familiar with. Beefy, Elk Finance, Elpis Battle, Lido, Tulip, and Venus Protocol all joined as partners! This doubled the number of partners to twelve which is a solid feat in itself. Was Brave done though? Not in the slightest! At the end of August, they announced a whooping Fifteen new integrations! Aldrin, ApolloX, Bonfida, Cropper, Holaplex, Honeyswap, Jet Protocol, Marinade, NounsDAO, SolanaFM, Solend, SolBlaze, Spartan Protocol, Velodrome, and XY Finance all joined bringing the total number of integrations to twenty-seven DeFi applications!
These partnerships are key for the future of Brave as it adds to their BAT token. While they have added different BAT token usages they never really took off or became what some anticipated. By working with these DeFi applications Brave creates an incentive for both parties to work together to create some sort of utility to encourage people with Brave Wallets to engage in their applications. This could lead to new usages that we have not thought of yet or imagined being brought to the platform!
Besides these huge partnerships, Brave has also added a new preloaded blockchain for all Brave Wallet users. Aurora is an Ethereum L2 solution that taps into NEAR protocol to give users much lower gas fees and much faster transactions. Being an EVM compatible users can interact with a variety of ERC-20 assets which people in the Ethereum world are much more familiar with than some of the other options out there! Since this is a new blockchain/ecosystem that is being tapped into it does not have all the integrations that other more established ecosystems have but the Brave team is working together with Aurora developers to bring online token swaps and bridging.
With the addition of numerous new blockchains, Brave Wallet users did have a sticking point in that those that wished to build up BAT bags on other networks required bridging, and those have been targets for hacks. On the desktop version now Brave users can use fiat to purchase BAT via Brave's partnership with Ramp on the Solana and Polygon blockchains! This allows people to dodge ETH gas fees and quickly acquire and deploy BAT to these two blockchains. This enhances and further builds out BAT's ecosystem.
Not to be forgotten Brave has also started to roll out Solana wallet support onto its mobile apps. It is safe to say I am not a huge fan of the iOS version since Apple disabled the ability to earn BAT and Brave did not fight it and just complied. Since I do not own an Android I am not sure how good it is but the mobile versions do tend to lag behind the desktop version. Now though users can create a new Solana wallet, import an existing Solana wallet, and be able to send/store Solana (SOL) and Solana Program Library (SPL) tokens. I am still holding out hope that Apple will eventually be forced by either pressure or the government to change their app store policies that cost users the ability to earn BAT on their iOS devices but only time will tell if it is successfully done.
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