Basic Attention Token (BAT) project is an open-source led by Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla), and a decentralized ad exchange platform built on the Ethereum platform. The project seeks to address fraud and opaqueness in digital advertising.
The token aims to correctly price user attention within the platform. Advertisers pay BAT to website publishers for the attention of users. The BAT ecosystem includes Brave, an open-source, privacy-centered browser designed to block trackers and malware. It leverages blockchain technology to anonymously and track user attention securely and rewards publishers accordingly.
The differences between BAT and BTC
Basic Attention Token (BAT) improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new unit of exchange between publishers, advertisers and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain. The value of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement. Users can block ads, pay to see different ads, or view ads and earn BAT tokens in exchange. On the other hand, advertisers achieve higher returns on investment through better targeting and reduced fraud. All this happens while the anonymity of the user is ensured.
1) Privacy
The user’s browsing data is kept completely private. All the information that one would need for ad-matching will, as a result, be unavailable. Third-party trackers are also blocked automatically.
2) Enhanced advertisement matching
The Brave browser keeps a complete collection of user data along with intent signals, active tabs, URLs, keyword search entry information, browsing information, etc. The platform, along with the Brave browser can also establish if users are in a favorable time and place in their browsing experience, in order to provide them with offers.
3) Improved experience
Users don’t have to reach out to external servers for every page load. Since ad matching is done locally, it leads to quality browsing, good battery life, less data usage, and minimal disturbed content flow.
Team
- Brendan Eich (founder) is long well-known as the creator of JavaScript and also a man behind one of the most popular browsers in the world, Mozilla Firefox.
- Brian Brondy (co-founder) was also involved with Mozilla Firefox. He was also instrumental in Evernote and Khan Academy as well
- Yan Zhu (security & privacy engineering) was part of Yahoo’s security engineering team from 2014-2015 and was also elected to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Technical Architecture Group (TAG).
- Scott Locklin (smart contracts & economics) is the co-founder of Kert Software.
Conclusion
Basic Attention Token has such a professional team that it is just a matter of time they will disrupt digital advertising. BAT could genuinely be one of the most revolutionary projects out there. Let’s hope that they can carry their positive momentum and give us a product we will widely use in the future.
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