During the last two weeks BAT didn’t illustrate high social activity. The latest AMA on June 5, 2019 featured Jimmy Secretan, Brave’s VP of Services and Operations. Jimmy fielded both pre-submitted and live questions from Redditors concerning a variety of topics, like what Brave’s grand mission is, the most exciting thing his team is currently working on and where he sees Brave in 10 years’ time. Stay tuned for BAT updates in the coming weeks!
Development
Social encounters
The latest AMA featured Jimmy Secretan, Brave’s VP of Services and Operations.
What is the grand mission of Brave that boosts morale and aligns all departments?
I think of Brave’s mission as providing the very best experience on the web, hands down. And a lot of things naturally follow from that. The best experience on the web should be fast and respect privacy. The best experience on the web should make ads a healthy part of the experience, not a burden. The best experience on the web should open up access to all the best content, in the way with the lowest possible friction.
What is the most exciting feature you and your team is working on these days?
I am very excited about all of the coming work around supporting redemption of Brave Rewards. Of course, the team is hard at work on 2-way wallet functionality, but I’m also very excited about the ability to redeem for different types of rewards in-browser.
We are currently working on integrating rewards redemption for gift certificates offered by our partner Tap. And once we have the underpinnings developed for in-browser redemption, we are hoping that using your Brave Rewards on premium content isn’t far behind. I think that with a scaled, private, global ad network providing rewards to users, with a very low friction way to use those rewards to smooth out the browsing experience, the idea of the Brave Rewards ecosystem will really hit stride.
When you guys are expecting to offer ads globally? Or at least full Europe? Also are you guys planning to add some warning that Brave ad blocker might break this site?
For ads in the rest of Europe, we are hoping to have that later in the year. My team and the research team have been working on scaling out the in-browser machine learning for different languages. Europe is of course a lot of work as we are tracking 20+ languages that we would want to deploy there. But the research team is putting in a lot of effort now to make those models easier to train and deploy.
For Brave ad blocking causing site issues, while this isn’t my area of expertise, I know that the browser team is putting in a ton of time on new ways to ensure the best web compatibility.
What prompted for the engineering ecosystem to not live under Brian Bondy (he is the CTO for the larger group)?
So, yeah, to clarify, Brian Bondy, the CTO of Brave manages the bulk of the engineering team and focuses on making sure the browser overall is fast, private and has all of the best features to navigate the web. I manage the engineering teams that focus on Brave Rewards specifically, including the backends that service them. Brian and I naturally work closely together on this, as we want to make sure that Brave Rewards first and foremost fits in well with the core browsing experience.
When using Brave with ads turned on, do you see the pop-up notifications as an intermediary step? Is the idea to have Brave eventually replace the current workflow of how ads are displayed on a site? By that, I mean, having your ad decision engine on the device instead of out in the world, but much of the same as to how they are displayed?
I think there are already plans in the works to consider other ways of signaling attention besides the pop up notification. And so yes, I think that definitely in the future, you will see ads in different form factors, but still with the decision engine running in-browser. However, naturally we consider any new form of notification very carefully before deploying, as we want to make sure that the ads experience always complements and never distracts from the browsing experience.
If I earn BAT for viewing ads and receive the monthly payout on the 5th. Do my earned BAT ever get taken away if not withdrawn or tipped prior to the next payout (each month on the 5th)?
Not to worry, you do not have to tip or withdraw those earnings before the next payout, they will remain in wallet.
When you plan to turn on ads on IOS?
Right after we release Brave Ads on Android, which is coming very soon, we are shifting our focus immediately to iOS.
Where do you see this company in 10 years? Do you have a broad stroked roadmap of what your milestones are? Major features, partnerships, usership?
Well 10 year horizons are always tough. Many of the industries we work in and around will have shifted fundamentally, and probably several times by then. In advertising for instance, programmatic as we know it was just coming on to the horizon 10 years ago, and has shifted a number of times itself. But the part that is probably not surprising is that we will be working to become the dominant browser by providing the best possible experience on the web, of which I think Brave Rewards is a major part.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (information from Etherscan.io)
Network statistics
*There is no up-to-date official information on Brave’s monthly and daily active user base.
Total amount of Brave Browser Publishers:
- Youtube publishers: 131 366
2) Website publishers: 25 215
3) Twitch publishers: 10 643
Roadmap
The BAT roadmap in 2019 is GitHub. More information you can find here.
- 2019:
Milestone 7: 0.60.x (done)
- Rust support for brave-core.
- Ads integration into Brave-core with foundations to support Rust based blind token confirmations
Milestone 7: 0.61.x (done)
Milestone 0.63.x (~April 23, 2019)
- Unify exception handling (done)
- Fix Brave shields localization (done)
- Make Widevine UI more noticeable (done)
- eTLD+1 matching for about:adblock (done)
- Working ads model, Rust-based blinded tokens for privacy-safe confirmation of ad views and interaction, and ability to give BAT monthly to users who see ads (done)
- Settings/Bookmarks/History/Downloads facelift (petemill, in progress; partially merged) (done)
- Add options for allowing FB login / embeds and Twitter embeds
- Upgrade to Chromium 74 (Max, in progress)
Milestone 0.64.x (~May 14, 2019)
- Custom ABP filter rules in about:adblock (done)
- UI improvements and support for theming in the Brave shields panel (done)
- Support for Nightly builds (done)
- Override regional ad-block selection in about:adblock
Milestone 0.65.x
- In page translations (Jocelyn, in progress)
- Add support for more locales
- Smart Tracking Protection (Pranjal, in progress)
Milestone 0.66.x
- Ad-block tokenization performance improvements (bbondy)
- Ad-block exceptions to be disabled by default and have UI asking to turn on when it is first detected (todo design)
- Social tipping
- P3A
Milestone 0.67.x
- Ability to compile Brave and produce an Android based APK (nothing close to releasable yet)
- Tie Brave Core Android builds to CI
- Add the ability to have social media login options into the Brave shields panel
Milestone 0.68.x
- Rust based ad-block integration (done)
- Ongoing work for Brave Core Android builds
- New work in social tipping
- P3A
Milestone 0.69.x
The full information can be found here.
Partnerships and team members
No updates
Rumours
No updates
Social media metrics
The charts above illustrate the changes and overall growth in the number of Twitter, Medium, Telegram followers and Reddit subscribers.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of BAT Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
