Brave Becomes Browser of Choice for Crypto Fans

The Ethereum-based Brave Browser is giving others a real run for their money.

Many crypto fans are choosing to use the Brave Browser over popular browsers such as Google Chrome and FireFox which dominate the market. This is despite crypto sceptics claiming that decentralised systems and dApps have no active user bases. In fact, American magazine Popular Science has recently praised the Brave Browser and suggested they are good alternatives to built-in browsers like Safari and Chrome.

So, what has the Brave Browser got that others haven’t?

According to the company, this free, open-source, pay-to-surf web browser provides a whole new way of thinking about how the web works. Created by the co-founder of the Mozilla Project, Brendan Eich, Brave allows you can do all the stuff you do on a normal browser, such as surfing the web, exploring sites etc. However, it claims to be able to browse the internet up to eight times faster than Chrome and Safari on a mobile phone and around twice as fast as Chrome on desktop resulting in users being able to load major news websites at superfast speed. And the beauty of it is that it boasts advanced security settings plus users will not incur data charges for downloading unwanted content as it features a built-in ad blocker.

Usually, mobile browsers have to pay charges for those pesky adverts and trackers which you don’t even want to view and some even have multiple ads and as many as 70 trackers per site which can invade your privacy by tracking your location and browsing activities, not to mention slowing your connection down. But Brave actually blocks these nuisance adverts so you don’t have to pay for something you didn’t want to see in the first place. The creators wanted to address this problem and answer the privacy concerns of users who were getting tired of all the ad tracking which comes with most browsers.

It works by blocking the tracking pixels and cookies that advertisers use to track your browsing clicks on sites. These are the cookies that remember when you looked up something on the net, usually, something embarrassing like fungal nail infection cream, and then plague you with adverts for it forever more. But, as Brave blocks these trackers and cookies, it makes it more difficult for advertisers to build a profile of your preferences and so limiting those annoying adverts that dominate your feed.

The other bonus to using Brave is that you can pledge your support for your favourite publishers by rewarding them with blockchain-based tokens. Developed by Brave Software Inc, its design is based on the Chromium web browser which comprises a Blink engine. The browser itself is founded on Chromium, an open-source project that also operates as the base protocol of Google Chrome. But, Brave uses an ERC20 token called Brave Attention Token (BAT) to provide added incentives for users.

BAT actually improves the way digital advertising works, making it work more efficiently by providing a new token that can be shared between advertisers, publishers and users on the Ethereum blockchain and can be utilised to gain attention-based services which gauge user attention.

It’s hardly surprising that the Brave Browser has attracted over three million users and over 18,000 publishers and content creators have registered as publishers which allows them to earn BAT from Brave’s users. A large number of users are YouTube and Twitch streamers who are earning.

By Joy Lewis.