During the last month BAT didn’t illustrate high social activity. The AMA on May 20, 2019 featured Lin Dai, CEO & Co-Founder of Hooch App and TAP Network, the first advertising and data network that connects brands to reward consumers directly using blockchain. Lin fielded both pre-submitted and live questions from Redditors about Hooch & TAP’s origin story, how the TAP and Brave partnership came to be, and what the user flow for redeeming TAP rewards with BAT tokens will look like. Lin shared impressive stats, like the fact that TAP Network currently has over 250,000 merchant and brand partners. He also shared some frightening ones: for instance, 3rd party companies on the web today can obtain data on a thousand or more people for $20 or less — with no compensation for the owners of that data. Stay tuned for BAT updates in the coming weeks!
Development
Social encounters
Can you keep the Brave community updated on the future progress? Can you give us the latest updates on the correct progress? What parts of the partnership already implemented and what/when we should expect next?
Lin Dai: Brave is a great partner for TAP and we are excited to be part of the community. We will absolutely do our best to keep the Brave community updated on progress. Since our joint announcement at Mobile World Congress, the two teams have been collaborating on both advertising and rewards integration. We share the same mission to help consumers take control of and monetize your own data. A big part of that effort is bringing the world’s biggest advertisers and brands into the eco-system. We’ve had some very exciting meetings sharing with top brands in the world how using Brave-TAP technology can help them create a better advertising experience, and build loyalty with consumers by rewarding them. We are a major partner in the recent Ad Platform launch in the Brave browser, and we are already actively working to integrate our existing brand partners into the Brave Ad Platform, in the form of new ads you may be seeing and earning BAT for. The next big launch that both teams are working on is the integration of the TAP redemption API into Brave Rewards, where you can spend your BAT to get any of our hundreds of top e-commerce and retail gift cards from Amazon to Uber and Starbucks, over 50,000+ major restaurants, or donate to 1,000+ charities and causes connected to the TAP Network. For a sneak peak, you can see all the redemption options in the Hooch App (downloadable in App Store or Google Play Store). Most of the redemption options available in Hooch App will be available in the Brave browser in the coming months. We are very excited about that.
What plans do you have to significantly grow its user-base? What sort of time-scales are you looking at for this?
Lin Dai: TAP Network’s long term mission, similar to Brave is to bring fairness and transparency to the advertising industry. We believe to compete with the current major players in the space we need to build a coalition. TAP is primarily deploying through B2B partnerships. We’ve built our own owned-and-operated app Hooch, which has hundreds of thousands of users, and give everyone a great example of how data and rewards work in the TAP Network. But we think the long term growth of TAP comes from deploying TAP rewards as white-label services for partners that share the same vision. Brave is a great example, Brave Rewards when powered by TAP Network will allow Brave users redeem BAT for 250,000+ rewards options available in the TAP eco-system. Beyond Brave, there are many partners in the advertising and media space that is getting unfairly pushed out by competitors such as Facebook. TAP is white-labeling our technology for non-blockchain companies in the media and entertainment space, really excited for major announcements in the coming months.
You’re currently at about 100k partners I believe. Do you have a target in mind for where you’d like to be?
Lin Dai: We are currently at 250,000+ merchant and brand partners. We are aiming to get to around 400,000 partners in the next 12 to 18 months. Yes it’s ambitious, but the hard work is actually done. The first 100 partners were extremely hard and took us almost a year to secure. We’ve learned a lot in the process. For example, almost no merchant partner understands or is willing to accept and hold onto crypto today, so we take the uncertainty out of the equation for them. TAP is a digital stable-coin pegged to the U.S. dollar, we manage the redemption and conversation to and from other crypto assets, and our merchants are guaranteed payment in FIAT. Now all we need to do is scale our partnership team and replicate our pitch 150,000 times more.
How does the BAT redeem process flow looks like? Which party (BAT, Uphold, TAP) does the KYC in between the redeem process?
Lin Dai: Based on the current plan, which will be subject to iterations as we go, from your Brave Browser you will be able to launch a rewards web page full of redemption options. The TAP rewards items such as gift cards, charity partner donations, and travel deals will be shown in # of BAT for each item, based on real-time price. Just like browsing your AmEx rewards redemption web site and shopping with “points”, you can “spend” your BAT. For example, earned BAT can be redeemed for a Starbucks gift card digitally displayed on-screen (with bar code scannable in-store) while TAP-BAT conversion happens behind the scenes and does not slow down or complicate the user experience at all.
What made you interested in partnering with Brave and integrating TAP & BAT?
Lin Dai: We are attracted to Brave because it has two things that almost no other blockchain companies have.
1. We care about consumer adoption. Brave already has millions of users, which almost no other projects can say, and
2. Brave is tackling the same unfair distribution and inefficiency in the advertising industry that we are setting out to disrupt as well.
Team wise, TAP and team are Marketing Tech veterans and advertising industry insiders. Our strength really compliments Brave’s own which makes us great partners. Plus the opportunity to work hand in hand with a legend such as Brendan Eich is just too good to pass up!
How many partners do you think tap will reach until the end of 2020?
Lin Dai: With the number of white-label partnerships we have in the pipeline, plus the accelerated growth of Brave community, we think we can reach 10M+ users on the TAP Network by end of 2020, perhaps more. It’s a mass adoption of blockchain without consumers having to realize their “rewards dollars” are blockchain tokens.
If the only source of revenue per customer is their data, how much is each user worth? What industries are purchasing the most consumer data in 2019?
Lin Dai: Your data is being abused and sold by many data vendors in the traditional “data” industry, actually fairly cheaply. A 3rd party company can buy fairly sophisticated data on 1,000 people for between $2 — $20. The worst part is no consumer ever got compensated for that. What we envision is a totally private system where your data is protected and not “sold” in traditional ways. Your data never leaves our protected environment, instead we’ve built tools to allow advertisers and brands to directly reach you and offer you rewards based on the data you share. In return, you receive up to 70% of the actual advertising revenue from brands, which is much greater than the piece arbitraged by data vendors for selling your data. We think over time, users can earn on average between $20 — $70 per year in the Brave-TAP eco-system, up to hundreds of dollars for power users. Essentially this over time will cut out traditional data vendors, who are middlemen and unnecessary if brands and consumers can directly connect in a consensual way.
When are you planning to enter other markets like Europe?
Lin Dai: Europe is our next major market to enter, and we’ve been collaborating with both bank partners and brands in the region. The challenge is not necessarily the technology, we know we can enable similar technology stack in Europe and South America fairly easily. It’s really about securing a coalition of brand partners and merchants that are willing to reward users for sharing their data. We’ve spent 3 years securing 250,000+ partners, and the great news is 200,000 of them are hotel partners worldwide — we already have coverage in virtually every European city, and offering 20–70% discounts plus 5–10% rewards in TAP on top of the discounts. You can access that today in the Hooch App, regardless of where you live. Our restaurant and e-commerce partners are mainly U.S. at the moment, but we are working hard to secure partner.
INSTEAD OF: GOOGLE CHROME
USE: BRAVE
If you’re like the majority of people out there, Chrome is your browser of choice. It has many benefits: it’s fast, works well with virtually every website, and offers a massive number of extensions and themes available for you to customize it to your liking.
But the bad thing about Chrome is that it allows Google to suck up even more data about how you browse the web and what you do on it. There are zero reasons to give Google even more data about yourself and your activities.
The most frequent objections I hear to this is that people like all those Chrome extensions Chrome has — some of which are exclusive to Google’s browser. But that extension lock-in is no longer an issue thanks to the Brave web browser. If you like Chrome, you’ll love Brave. That’s because Brave looks and works exactly like Chrome and is compatible with every Chrome theme and extension And since Brave is built with privacy in mind, it offers features Google would never allow in Chrome.
Finance
Open source ad-blocking browser Brave is seeking to shake up digital advertising with the unveiling of a new ad model which promises to pay viewers a 70% cut of any promotion they see.
Brave Ads is available on the latest version of the software for Windows, Mac and Linux, enabling people to earn its custom cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Tokens for each of over 500 built-in ads consumed.
Crucially the entire system is optional with users having to first opt into the Brave Rewards programme and then activate ads to participate, increasing the attractiveness of each individual to brands.
It comes as its Johnny Ryan, chief policy and industry relations officer at Brave, spearheads complaints that Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe’s (IAB) data practices are knowingly in breach of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This is part of the browser’s efforts to disrupt digital advertising and strengthen consumer privacy.
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: 114 176
2) Website publishers: 22 882
3) Twitch publishers: 9 610
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
- Ongoing work for Brave Core Android builds
Milestone 0.69.x
The full information can be found here.
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.
