Whether you’re aware of it or not, you are paying to browse the web . Pop-up windows, advertisement videos, and a barrage of banners, callouts, cookies, and trackers are all taking up your attention. Advertisers have been transmitting your valuable private data without your permission , and that data is transmitted through invasive ad technology that you downloaded.

That’s the way things are, but it’s not the way things have to remain: Brave offers a new browsing experience – one that values your time, money, and personal information. How much? Enough for them to pay you for it.

Brave blocks third-party ads, cookies, pop-ups, and trackers by default . The browser is free, and you’re welcome to browse the internet sans impediments and irritations forevermore. That said, there’s the argument that by ignoring ads you’re not giving publishers any way to generate revenue . This will end poorly for both them and you; publishers not generating income means less free content for users . In short, if they can’t afford to give free content anymore, they won’t . Get ready to start paying to watch YouTube videos or paying to read online news articles.

That’s not the future anybody wants. Brave has taken this into serious consideration, and has proposed a solution:

Brave Rewards

Brave Rewards is an optional feature of the browser that allows users to anonymously contribute to their favorite sites. Once enabled, Brave automatically keeps track of the time you spend and the attention you give to any sites you visit. Brave also routinely gives out a monthly grant of free BAT to its users. Put as much in your wallet as you like!

Brave Rewards divides up that amount once a month, distributing it accordingly to the sites you’ve visited; you finally get to decide which sites benefit from your monetized attention. If you want to contribute money toward a site, this can also be done through Brave: You can send one-off tips to content creators.  Likewise, if there’s a site you visit that you do not want to contribute to, simply remove the site from the list.

How to block ads and still reward your favorite sites

Your contributions are anonymous

If you’re concerned about which companies you’re supporting, you’ll be glad to know that Brave Rewards employs a technology called Anonize . This allows for “anonymous-but-accountable transactions.” Anonize utilizes “Zero Knowledge Proofs” to identify that users are authorized to make transactions … but cannot tell who you are specifically. All Anonize knows is that you’re registered to donate your BAT. No one will know which sites you’ve chosen to support – not Brave, and not the sites themselves. All Brave does is tally up the total support for each site and send tokens ( Basic Attention Tokens ) their way. That said, users are always able to check which sites they’ve previously supported, how much support they’ve given, and decide which they want to support in the coming month.

If this is confusing, Brave presents a handy analogy: “Someone walks into a polling place, identifies themselves, and gets a ballot and an envelope. They go into a voting booth, mark the ballot, put the ballot in the envelope, and seal it. They then drop the envelope in a ballot box. The people running the polling place and counting the ballots know that each person putting an envelope in the ballot box is authorized to vote, but they aren’t able to determine which envelope in the ballot box goes with which person.”

Help fund YouTube creators

By default, Brave lets you watch YouTube videos without being hassled by ads. Enable Brave Rewards, however, and now you can also help sponsor your favorite YouTubers. Brave has expanded support for the Basic Attention Token to YouTube creators, which enables a direct relationship between the content creators and you: You can support content creators with your BAT, and the content creators can then sell that BAT for profit. While this will help any and all YouTubers, this is especially beneficial to those with under 10,000 views, since they’re not yet receiving ad revenue from YouTube .

So is this like Bitcoin?

No, BAT is not a digital currency; it’s a utility token. BAT is used to indicate exchanges between users, advertisers, and publishers, and allows the Brave browser to directly measure and verify the attention that you spend online. As Brave explains on their FAQ page , “since BAT is a utility token it can be used as a unit of account between advertisers, publishers, and users on the BAT platform, and can be utilized to directly measure, exchange, and verify attention. Bitcoin would not enable this distinct, in-platform problem solving. Finally, using BAT on Ethereum allows for faster scalability than using Bitcoin.”

So it’s not Bitcoin… is it safe?

Short answer: Yes.

Brave’s servers don’t own custody of any funds in a user’s Brave wallet. Moreover, Brave isn’t even able to access that information. That means it’s literally impossible for anyone to steal any of that data from you, or manage it at all. The BAT is yours alone to distribute how you wish.

If you experiment with Brave Rewards and find you don’t like it, no harm done! You can switch it back off via the Rewards Preferences page right here:

Likewise, you can always re-engage it or alter your monthly contribution amount on the Monthly Payment menu. Users can start calling the shots where their BAT gets to go, and content creators can sign up with Brave Rewards to start receiving BAT from users. Check back with us for updates, and for any additional information about your Brave wallet, you can check out Brave’s FAQ page .

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