What does BAT stand for and what is it?

BAT stands for Basic Attention Token. It is a utility token based on the Ethereum technology that can also be used as a unit of account between advertisers, publishers, and users within Brave Rewards. The token is not a digital currency, security or a commodity.

Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain.

The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the BAT platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.

The Challenge

Digital advertising is overrun by middlemen, trackers and fraud.

Users are abused

• Up to 50% of the average user’s mobile data is for ads and trackers, costing as much as $23 a month.

• Ads use about 5 seconds of mobile load time on average.

• Ads decrease phone battery life by as much as 21%.

• Privacy is violated when large media sites host up to 70 trackers.

• Malware (malvertisements, ransom-ware) is up 132% in one year.

Publishers are hurting

• Google and Facebook take 73% of all ad dollars and 99% of all growth.
• Revenue is recently down 66%. 
• Bots inflicted $7.2 billion in fraud last year.
• Over 600 million phones and desktops run ad-blocking.
• Publishers cannot seamlessly monetize value added services.

Advertisers are losing

• Advertisers lack good information on what they are paying for.
• Marketers are often fooled by bogus websites and bots that commit fraud.
• Targeting is poor, making users more likely to ignore ads.