Recently Coinbase announced support for BAT, giving new investors access to purchase tokens directly through their brokerage service (CoinbasePro). Recent reports indicate that Coinbase has plans to list BAT on it's main trading platform (Coinbase.com) within weeks. If this occurs, it would give many more crypto traders exposure to BAT, given the volume that Coinbase processes daily.
The purpose of this article is to outline some pros and cons of BAT that one may consider before deciding whether to invest in the token. Additionally, I will highlight some other relevant factors about BAT (and Brave) which you should know before getting involved with it (or any crypto project). The reader must do their own research and make up their own mind as to whether or not they should invest in BAT or any cryptocurrency. Note: this article does not constitute financial advice; please be aware that the author is biased for reasons specified below.
Positive: BAT is a token that will be utilized within the Brave Browser, which has been downloaded over 4 million times across all platforms.
The browser has been available for almost 2 years and has proven to provide users with increased privacy, faster page loading speeds and ad-free browsing. The company behind BAT (Brave) also built an attention based rewards system called "Brave Ledger" that operates between publishers, advertisers and users in a transparent manner . This solution provides incentives for publishers to produce high quality content while serving fewer ads to their users. Users get faster page loads and protection from malvertising attacks because of the lack of ads & trackers on their pages; they also earn BAT tokens when viewing ads.
Negative: A privacy-focused browser with wallet functionality is not a new idea. There are plenty of privacy-based browsers available, some with their own token/crypto system baked in (Tor + TAZ, for example). While BAT does have the potential to incentivize users to browse ad free, it is unclear how many people will actually use the Brave Browser over an alternative like Firefox which already has similar features built in.
Another negative factor includes uncertainty about how quickly Brave Ledger can scale. While Brave currently displays only top-level page views on the Ledger, they have plans to expand this feature to track individual advertisements being viewed by each user via Javascript code that runs on the browser level. A full blockchain implementation of the Ledger would incur a large amount of data usage and storage space, which is a problem for a browser that emphasizes speed & efficiency.
There have been some claims made by Brave that "less than 15% of ads being displayed in general" are actually viewed by users. This has been questioned due to the lack of accessible tools available via third party advertisers (like Nielsen or comScore) who can provide these statistics; while publishers who use ad exchanges like Google AdEx may be able to access this information, there is no verification available outside of their own reporting on how many impressions were actually served.
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