I love Brave, and its associated crypto called Basic Attention Token or BAT. For a few years now it has been my default browser. Brave is ad-free and feels fast and snappy, and I’m particularly drawn to the politics hidden under the hood. Let me explain.

The Brave/BAT combo was founded in 2015 by two tech giants - Brendan Eich, who created Javascript and co-founded Mozilla, and Brian Bondy who was lead developer at Mozilla and Khan Academy. Eich and Bondy were offering an alternative economic advertising model to “surveillance capitalism”, a term coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff - which means: tracking users to sell their data to advertisers.

From a user's perspective, Brave is ad-free and fast, with a reassuringly familiar and robust feel due to its Chromium backbone. And it is private -  personal data stays personal and never leaves the browser.

It's under the hood where things get interesting. Eich and Bondy’s idea was to create an alternative economic advertising model to rival surveillance capitalism, as typified by YouTube.

With YouTube, the user’s personal data is sold without consent to advertisers, and the user has to pay a premium for the privilege of an ad-free experience.

However in Brave, it’s the reverse. Brave is ad-free by default. Not only that, the user can opt in and actually get paid to view ads! Payment is in BAT, an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain. It is payment for the user's “attention”, hence the name Basic Attention Token.

Brave works by blocking ads and replacing with its own "opt-in" advertising system. Ad revenue is split between all parties involved, including the often-forgotten, some would say exploited, humble user. Brave gets a cut, the website that published the ad gets a cut, and you and I (if we opted in) get a cut for giving our attention - time we'll never get back... except in BAT.

BAT acts as an internal currency within Brave's ecosphere. It can be easily exchanged for other cryptos or fiat currencies. Today (mid March 2026) BAT is priced at about $0.10 with a market cap of $150 - $160 million, ranking it at around #200.

In 2025, Brave surpassed 100 million monthly active users, still small compared to Chrome but quickly catching Firefox. By using Brave, you aren't just getting a fast ad-free browser or a few cents in BAT, you are helping flip the script to one where our attention has value, and that privacy should be respected not exploited. Fight for a fairer internet.

Download Brave here. Spoiler: YouTube is a joy without ads :) Be Brave and thank me later.

This article has no association with Brave or BAT. It is simply my opinion based on my experience using Brave.