About
Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a digital advertising token. It is built on the Ethereum blockchain. BAT was created by Brendan Eich (Creator of JavaScript. Co-founder of Mozilla & Firefox). The BAT token creates an advertisement exchange marketplace. Advertisers, publishers, and users will connect in a decentralized manner. BAT monetizes user attention and removes middlemen related to ad networks.
Major aspects of Basic Attention Token (BAT) include:
· Cutting out the middlemen
· Serves as a unit of exchange
· Rewards users, publishers, and advertisers.
o Users get paid for giving attention to ads.
o Publishers get a portion of the ad revenue as is the norm.
o Advertisers get better ROI for their content.
The problem statement
The digital advertising space is inefficient. Users, publishers, and advertisers are exploited by middlemen
Users
· Ads and trackers cost is $23 per user’s data
· Mobile load time decreases by 5 seconds.
· Malware (malvertisements, ransom-ware) is increasing exponentially
Publishers
· Centralized platforms take high % of all ad dollars
· $7.2 billion in fraud inflicted by bots last year
Advertisers
· Lack of directed information for advertisements.
· Bogus websites and bots commit fraud.
· Poor targeting
The Solution: Basic Attention Token
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is trying to solve the inefficient digital advertising market. BAT runs on a secure, anonymous, opt-in advertising system. It is a token of exchange, based on the browser and the mobile app view. Advertisers reward publishers with BAT based on the measured attention of users. Users receive some BAT for participating. They can donate BAT back to publishers or use BAT on the platform.
Benefits:
Users
· Use of a web browser to control ads
· Strong privacy and security during advertisements
· Improved relevance and performance
· Receive a share of tokens
Just to check, I opened the Amazon website in the Brave browser and within a few seconds it showed me a list of 14 items blocked by the browser.
Publishers
· Improved revenue
· Better reporting
· Less fraud — Prevention of the manipulation of the number of clicks by robots.
Advertisers
· Move from a quantitative to a qualitative advertising model: fewer ads but better quality ads.
· Less expensive customer attention
· Less fraud
· Better attribution
Token Technology
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is an important element of a new marketplace. BAT will be implemented in the flagship product Brave, in a phased manner. Brave Micropayments Ledger will enable Micropayments using BAT. The Brave Ledger system is an open-source Zero-Knowledge Proof scheme. The Brave Ledger system is an open-source Zero-Knowledge Proof scheme. This will be the first stage of deployment. Basic Attention Metric (BAM) verifies each viewed ad.
· The advertiser sends a BAT payment along with ads to users in a locked state (Xa).
· The users view the ads, the flow of payments unlocks
o A Part of the payment goes to the user’s wallet (Xu)
o A share of the payment is passed to Brave (Xb)
o The remainder on to the Publisher (Xa-Xu-Xb)
Opportunities:
· New revenue for premium content providers: New revenue models for premium content providers might be unlocked.
o A user can buy content for friends using BAT micropayments.
o Users can see higher quality content for a BAT transaction.
o Video or audio content in news can be restricted to people for a small micropayment.
o Comments ranking or voting using BAT tokens
· Purchase digital goods using BAT. For example, high-resolution photos, data services, or publisher applications that are only needed on a one-time basis.
Use Case: The Brave Browser
Brave is an in-house native browser. It runs on BAT.
· Brave defends devices data
· It synchronizes personal and private browsing profiles across devices using client-side encryption.
· On-device-only machine learning studies user data. It provides private and anonymous options to get compensated for your attention.
· It blocks all third-party trackers and middle-players
· Publishers are provided with a substantially larger revenue share.
Roadmap
· Pre 1.0 BAT: The following features are already in place:
o An anonymized ledger system for making donations and payments to publishers based on user attention.
o The secure vault using the ANONIZE algorithm to ensure customer privacy is an important piece of the BAT ecosystem.
o Brave is already measuring user attention at the browser level and distributing donations to the publishers using this system.
· 1.0 BAT: Brave browser comes with a BAT wallet. Zero-Knowledge Proof ledger system is verifying transactions. Basic Attention Metric (BAM) data reports will analyze ad inventory.
· Beyond 1.0 BAT: Transfer and verification process will be completely distributed on Ethereum. It will use a state channel scheme with the Zero-Knowledge Proof protocol. A decentralized audit trail will be provided to advertisers, users, and publishers.
· Browser as platform/BAT: Applications will be built on BAT infrastructure.
Conclusion:
BAT is one of the Top use cases of Ethereum. It almost has no competitor. It has a very strong team behind it. It is slowly but successfully implementing its Road Map. It is fast and has a considerable number of users. It has recently partnered with Binance. BAT is one of the strangest projects in the cryptocurrency space.
Reference: Basic Attention Token
Read More: Proof Of Stake, Proof Of Work Explained, Understanding different Consensus Mechanisms
