Our Goal with Brave
Yesterday, we launched the 1.0 version of our privacy web browser,
Brave. Brave is an open source browser that blocks all 3rd-party ads, trackers, fingerprinting, and cryptomining; upgrades your connections to secure HTTPS; and offers truly Private “Incognito” Windows with
Tor—right out of the box. By blocking all ads and trackers at the native level,
Brave is up to 3-6x faster than other browsers on page loads, uses up to
3x less data than Chrome or Firefox, and helps you extend battery life up to 2.5x.
However, the Internet as we know it faces a dilemma. We realize that publishers and content creators often rely on advertising revenue in order to produce the content we love. The problem is that most online advertising relies on tracking and data collection in order to target users,
without their consent. This enables malware distribution, ad fraud, and social/political troll warfare. To solve this dilemma, we came up with a solution called
Brave Rewards, which is now available on all platforms, including iOS.
Brave Rewards is entirely opt-in, and the idea is simple: if you choose to see privacy-respecting ads that you can control and turn off at any time,
you earn 70% of the ad revenue. Your earnings, denominated in “Basic Attention Tokens” (BAT), accrue in a built-in browser wallet which you can then use to tip and support your favorite creators, spread among all your sites and channels, redeem for products, or exchange for cash. For example, when you navigate to a website, watch a YouTube video, or read a Reddit comment you like, you can
tip them with a simple click. What’s amazing is that over 316,000 websites, YouTubers, etc. have already signed up, including major sites like
Wikipedia,
The Guardian,
The Washington Post,
Khan Academy and even
NPR.org. You can too.
In the future, websites will also be able to run their own privacy-respecting ads that you can opt into, which will give them 70% of the revenue, and you—their audience—a 15% share (we always pay the ad slot owner 70%, and we always pay you the user at least what we get). They’re privacy-respecting because Brave moves all the interest-matching onto your device and into the browser client side, so
your data never leaves your device in the first place. Period. All confirmations use an anonymous and unlinkable blind-signature cryptographic protocol. This flipping-the-script approach to keep all detailed intelligence and identity where your data originates, in your browser, is the key to ending personal data collection and surveillance capitalism once and for all.
Brave is available on both desktop (Windows PC, MacOS, Linux) and on mobile (Android, iOS), and our pre-1.0 browser has already reached over 8.7 million monthly active users—something we’re very proud of.
We hope you try Brave and join this growing movement for the future of the Web. Ask us anything! ,
