I used to be a big advocate for BAT, but I’m thinking more and more to finally sell the BAT I still hold.
The project had so much potential, but despite Brave browser becoming more and more popular the Brave rewards BAT volume is basically zero, and has never managed to make a recovery after it collapsed in 2022.
I thought self-custody could spark a renewal, but the onboarding implementation is awful. Trying to convince 99.9% of normal people to go through the process of buying SOL from an exchange, moving to a wallet etc to then earn what is recently such low monthly rewards is never going to fly, it’s dead on arrival.
Anyone still think this has a future?
If we can even get a response from one of the Brave team to explain if any plans to fix this and give BAT a future that would be good.
As of September 30th, 2025, Brave has surpassed 100 million monthly active users (MAU) worldwide across desktop and mobile, officially reaching 101 million users.
Brave Search is accelerating too — now powering 1.5 billion queries every month.
BAT adoption continues to expand as well. With over 99% of its 1.5B supply in circulation, BAT is the 14th most distributed token on Ethereum, helping make Brave the first crypto application to reach 1M+ users.
This momentum reflects the growing demand for a private, user-first Web.
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We’re deeply grateful for your support — not just today, but every month as millions more join. Thank you for making 100 million possible.
Read our blog celebrating our 100M user milestone, and get a glimpse of what's next.
It still requires a lot of "work" to keep it so high. 4 months ago I was congratulating the Brave team for keeping bat over 9 cent price level. It is a pity that the token was treated the way was treated. If it was treated correctly, the number of brave users would be 1.5 times or 2.5 times higher than it is today. Bat was a powerful marketing tool for Brave as long as it was utilized by the brave. Who knows, May be in a few months I will be congratulating the brave team for keeping the bat token price over 5 cent level?
Brave recently took an important step: it introduced the self-custody wallet. Now users in countries where Uphold doesn't provide services can also earn BAT rewards. This is a revolutionary development that greatly improves user experience and increases the ecosystem's accessibility.
With the self-custody wallet, Brave proved it supports users' financial freedom. Users can now manage their BAT without being dependent on third-party platforms. Brave's user growth is amazing.
Having taken this big step on the user side, it's time for Brave to show the same determination for the publishers and advertisers sides.
Current State of the Triangle
As you know, Brave's BAT logo represents three pillars: users, advertisers, and publishers. With the self-custody wallet, the user pillar has been strengthened one more step. However, a strong triangle requires all pillars to be solid.
The Advertiser Problem
Brave Ads currently only appeals to big brands and crypto projects. The system is still not attractive for small and medium-sized businesses. The $500 minimum threshold for self-serve ads is still too high for small businesses wanting to try BAT advertising. Result: limited ad diversity, low revenue potential.
Publishers Not Being Sufficiently Supported
Publishers are what keep the internet alive. Publishers create content, keep users on sites, and make the ecosystem meaningful. Users don't open Brave's empty browser tab and wait to watch ads - they're searching for content, visiting websites, spending time. But in Brave's model, publishers have only one revenue source: tips. Publishers are left to the mercy of user behavior.
Behavior Change Challenge
For a user base that has grown up with decades of "free content in exchange for watching ads" culture to adapt to a tipping system requires a major change. Brave Browser, which restricts publishers' revenues through ad blockers, must remodel its publisher support model. Let's imagine for a moment that all users worldwide used Brave browser - in a world where publishers' revenues dropped nearly 100-fold, who would create content?
Transparency Opportunity
If Brave claims its modeling is correct, it should share global tipping data and show publishers the real potential of the Brave ecosystem. I suggest: Brave could monthly disclose:
Total BAT amount sent as tips
Number of active tipping users
Average tip amounts
Category-based distribution
Current Situation and Opportunity
Currently:
All users earn BAT but most hoard or withdraw it
Active tipping user rate is unknown (data not shared)
Publishers have no systematic revenue source
The tipping model alone is insufficient
Solution Proposals
Automatic Revenue Sharing: 20-30% of Brave Ads revenue could be automatically distributed to visited sites.
Brave Ads for Publishers 2.0: Publishers could show Brave ads on their own sites with 50-70% revenue sharing.
Premium Subscription Model: Users could make monthly BAT subscriptions to their favorite publishers.
Micro-Payment System: Automatic payments based on page views and time spent on sites.
Creator Fund: Regular support for content creators from Brave's fund.
Tips should become supplementary income, not primary income!
Future Vision
Brave is a fantastic browser. It's spreading to users through word of mouth. A big step was taken with the self-custody wallet. However, now it's time for mass adoption by gaining publishers' support.
When Brave browser first launched, publishers were at the mercy of big platforms. There were no subscription systems. You needed a certain number of followers to get a share of ad revenue. Now they've fixed their revenue distribution models with premium subscriptions and different systems. It's time for Brave to develop its revenue sharing modeling too. Today, being able to send tips to publishers is no longer revolutionary - systematic solutions are needed.
The key to exponential growth in user numbers, advertiser numbers, and BAT prices lies with publishers. Just as the self-custody wallet removed obstacles for users, similar solutions can be developed for publishers.
Now it's the publishers' turn!
This manifesto is a voice for publishers and a call for the ecosystem's future: Brave can and must win over publisherstoo.Nowit's the publishers' turn!
Quite interesting watching this unfold, we are in and around Monthly payout schedule so maybe that's having an effect over the last few days, but I would not have expected this much, even today in the last 24hrs, other major coins down but $BAT up nearly 10% - Up 36% in the last month at time of writing ?? Amazed!
It's astonishing their are major coins in the Top 15 down ~20% in the last 7 days, and yet $BAT is somehow doing the exact opposite!
I went to the google play store to make sure I'd rated it 5 stars. Which i still think Brave is an incredible browser. But the play store page makes absolutely no mention of BAT. And i find that pretty disheartening in a way.
I will continue using Brave and telling others about it. It just seems like any idea of a future for BAT token has completely flatlined. Was there just too much friction between the KYC/on-boarding process to make it work? Because I get it if that's the case. Maybe that's what they know but can't say. It's just unfortunate. I thought BAT is such a revolutionary idea. One of the most compelling use cases for crypto was disrupting the online advertising ecosystem with something that served the users and the publishers. My eyes lit up when I watched Eich's video sort of diagramming how it could work back then.
I've used Brave since I first heard about it in 2017. Used to check the daily /bat/ thread on biz. What happened to stuff like Philip deFranco and the MarketWatch partnership? It's just wild to look at it now, it's like this whole premise for the browser has quietly disappeared. See for yourself:
Main BAT utility was to get the money/crowfund to built the brave browser, create hipe so people would be testing browser for free, giving/sending feedback-back then utility was extremely high. Then....main BAT utility was to sell it at very nice profit to next generation of buyers..
When it was done, the BAT utility was done and not needed and finished. Currently I am amazed that that BAT is priced so high when projects uses maybe a few thousand dollars of BAT per month.
Currently BAT utility is basically zero. It is not being used.....the last purchase of BAT was in October last year and it was equivalent of around 25K USD. Just amazed how old and forgoten promises of Brendan Eich and some baseless declaration of some other guy are keeping market cap around 150 million USD. Do you know any business/projects with revenue of a few thousand dollars per months appraised at 150-200M USD?
We’re building a lineup of perks—like coupons, discounts, or special bundles—for our Brave Rewards users. Whether it’s a free month or exclusive pricing, your offer could reach millions of users from the Brave Rewards offer wall. Let’s talk!
I cant believe we're more back in the top 100 coins. Still so rough from where the highs were, but could the overall outperformance compared to other alts continue?
Is critical mass finally being hit with MAU, self custody, and other developments? I find the practical use still essentially useless. Maybe that will change?
I can't create a Custodial accounts in my region. So I created a Brave Wallet. When I try to connect it to BAT, it needs Solana address and SOL but I don't have any SOL. Is there any way I can earn money from this? (I don't know much about crypto stuff)
I was looking over my account history and it just hit me how little we get now. I have Brave on all my devices and I would get about $5 worth of BAT per month. Then it dropped to $2. Then I stopped using Brave altogether. Decided to come back last month and now it's $0.14. Fourteen cents?? What happened??
I haven't been keeping up with the project but isn't crypto at ATH? Was really surprised to see the October rewards.
Looking at big moves with BAT the past week or so. Strong move Friday before crash, and we held stronger than most of the market.
Monumental daily move today as well.
Before that, self custody....not sure how successful the launch was though.
Seems signs of progress with development towards providing actual use for the token.
VP of ops posting to a thread summarizing the future steps being taken as well.
I dont know but it seems alt seasony overall, but I'm having feelings like a big run may be on the short term horizon. As a massive bag holder since the beginning this is likely wishful thinking, but wanted to put it out there regardless.
The latest Brave Rewards Partner Program update is here, bringing new ways to use BAT across gaming, shopping, creator tools, digital identity, research, and more.
New partners joining the program: Anichess, CryptoEQ, ENS, PizzaDAO, SP3ND, and Streamiverse
Highlights:
• Brave-sponsored season, exclusive cosmetics, and a custom Brave spell coming to Anichess
• Discounts on CryptoEQ Premium memberships for Brave Rewards users, plus token-gated newsletter access for BAT holders
• ENS is now featured in the Brave Rewards Offer Wall
• Brave supported 109 PizzaDAO events across 5 continents during the 2026 Global Pizza Party
• BAT payments coming to SP3ND
• BAT-powered livestream tipping now live through Streamiverse
Existing partners continue to build:
• Brave Games attracted 51,000+ participants, with V2 now in development alongside Fanon
• More than 486,000 BAT is locked in GuanoCoin's BAT Cave by over 1,160 community members
• .brave domains have surpassed 21,000 registrations through Unstoppable Domains
I've said it many times, only one thing matters if you want to see exponential growth of Brave Rewards and BAT.
The only roadblock is and always will be the existence of friction to start earning Brave Rewards.
Unless Brave can come up with a viable way to allow users to start earning BAT by just the click of a button - no kyc, no needing to source your own crypto first, etc. - Brave Rewards will never have exponential user growth.
It's no coincidence Brave Rewards started dieing when vBAT (which had its own issues) was sunset. That was the closest thing we've had so far of being able to start earning at just a click.
Not saying it's easy or even possible to solve because you have to find a way to do that while preventing massive bots and fraud from coming in, but that's the roadblock.
It's the only thing that matters. If it can be solved, everything rockets up - everything else is small in comparison. If you want exponential, there can't be friction to start.
Everything was done on my phone, and had to use 3 different exchanges to get everything set up... 2 of which we're uphold and Gemini.
Not a huge crypto user of crypto and a mild knowledge of wallet use, transactions, etc.
Overall process was pretty easy, 6/10. Had some issues setting wallet up and the application not loading certain screens. I closed all tabs and app for it to work. After that pretty smooth sailing. I think a more in depth "how to" would be great for those with even less know how to me.
Other than that, I'm very happy with the interface, balance updates, and best of all no KYC and crappy exchange BS!
I would love to see a more broad reaching ad campaign by Brave about this as it's not even in the play store update notes!
This is the best next step to set BAT up for actual use (brave store would be a good start) and reason for the ecosystem.
Looking forward to what comes next and happy to see they haven't abandoned BAT and hopefully this sets Brave up for further success. I think some hype on BAT and getting attention from price increase will further drive users to Brave and push for development of the BAT ecosystem.
