Thank you, or you can kick the music back on.
Everyone in the meantime, please do us a favor. Tweet out the space, share the space. We will start about roughly a few minutes.
I'll start us off. So today we have the AMA with Brave Software. I'm representing a part of the team. We do have Luke, Luke, we appreciate you stopping by today. We also do appreciate you sticking by us while we were having some technical difficulties. So shut out to you. Also shut out to Drew who helped set this up.
between our team as well as the Brave Software team. We appreciate everyone that was in the middle of this and assisted with the setup of this process. Guys, once again, please share the space we do appreciate that as well as we thank you for your time and being here and joining us today on this middle of the evening day.
Luke, I, uh, can we get a mic check on you really quick?
Yeah, yeah, can you hear me? Awesome loud and clear loud and clear. Just want to make sure we have any more technical difficulties in the meantime with with the space Once again guys, please share out the space and we will we were gonna get started right now Luke before we kick the soft Please introduce yourself let us know how you kind of found a crypt a high found your way into the brave software team all that great stuff
Yeah, yeah, happy to. So yeah, I'm Luke Malk, VP of business operations at Brave and at the basic attention token, that and so I started working with Brave back in March of 2016 back when Brave put out a request for
for proof of concept called brave payments, which initially used Bitcoin and introduced a new model for monetizing on the web where users could get a Repshare and it could basically use Bitcoin and be an alternative to what Big Tech kind of had to
grown to be on the advertising space and can I make a user first web for everybody. And so I joined the team full time later that year. I think it was the 11th or 12th full time employee. I don't know. It was early, really early on. I worked with the team on the basic adventure token, white paper, my background,
I was a director of ad products for a company called OEO for many years working with the biggest companies, media companies online, they concast NBC, NFL, Warner Brothers, a lot of big ones and also with all the different advertising.
And so you kind of like saw how all the sausage was made and what job was kind of making sausage, making money work with all that stuff. And I was in startups before that. I launched a couple startups and then it was in publishing and media production before that too. But yeah, like, so we kind of fell into crypto through brave
by use dick went a little bit before jumping to brave and when we saw what was going on with Ethereum and this whole concept of tokenizing different things and attention became a really good use case for that. So yeah, we worked on the bat white paper and I helped put together a lot of the average
And then as we brought to market, I started working with the community and kind of oversaw the community and through our token sale and even after that. And now like we've got a great team on community that does that. And once we got pretty succonset out,
for a lot of this crypto stuff, like as business lines, we then had to kind of scale them up into our operations. And so my background was pretty well equipped for helping to do that too. So yeah, but that's a bit for me. And what really stood out to me was that Brave was doing something that everybody had really done.
before at scale and had a working product before launching a token and all of that. Obviously, our CEO is Brennan Ike. He created JavaScript in the '90s and then also co-founded the Zillow Firefox. It was at a time where he brought the browser to market.
when Internet Explorer is kind of like how Chrome is today, like they're just massive. And so, you know, the team here is just a really diverse group of folks that really just want a better web for people. And I was super appealing to me and it was the first thing I'd really seen taking a new approach seriously. And yeah, that's about it.
I appreciate that look. Yeah, so I will kind of, you know, emit my bias really early on during this during this during this AMA. The fact that I do use the brave extension the brave browser and daily basis. I feel a lot more secure using this extension using this browser. I've actually found through personal experience of using it every day on a constant basis that I do get different results when I use the
when I use a search engine that I would a lot say like, I'm, you know, Google or one of these other browsers, which is, which is definitely neat. Luke, can you kind of provide us a deep dive on terms of like for those that are listening right now, and they're not really familiar with the brave software, the, or the brave browser and kind of what brave is. That's, you know, obviously, when you guys have been#
Yeah, yeah, happy to so so at all with brave it all started with the brave browser Which basically like if you go back to like 2016 You know people were been ad blocking for a while and an ad blocking was increasing year over year a lot But it was it was a very manual experience and
people that's allowed for five extensions to have you know ad walking and tracking protection and all that. And what our CEO like laid out was like look like the web originally was supposed to be user first. It definitely has in it when I say user first, I mean you're designing the design
The main thing is that you're putting the user as the main attention. All your attention is on building something from the user's point of view. If you look at the web group, Google and all these big ad tech companies basically would
service users information and profit off of that without the user even really knowing what was going on. Even now with all these disclosure users really don't know what's going on, where their data is going, etc. Who's making money off of it. Brave wanted to start with a browser and say, "Look, the last line of defense
here, basically, between this big tech blob and the users is the web browser. That's where the web browser is a client inside user agent that is there between you and everything on the web. I mean, it's actually the actual metaverse, basically, like the web. But you have to do this from a browser.
where you have control over the software on the client. And so Brave started with the browser and we started shipping a browser that had ad blocking and tracking protection basically built in. And like I said before, like our early Brave payments proof of concept used Bitcoin and we had a wallet in there really early.
really on and then we evolved that out. But it started with the browser and then we did interesting things in the browser like with the token. What we also did to about a year and a half ago or so was we bought a search engine and introduced Brave Search. So it's a
private search index, independent search index, like one of three, they're basically like Google being and then Brave or like the independent search indexes that are in the market. And other search engines are using APIs from Bing or Google or, you know, soon Brave to basically power search. And so
When you have private browsing, user first browsing, user first search, private search, and then a native multi-chain web3 wallet all built into one, into a platform where over 90% of browser users are making some kind of an e-commerce transactions.
That's a huge opportunity to scale a new web that is truly user first. What else it means by that is user should not be getting their data harvested without them knowing about it. There should be business models that aren't behaving in that hostile way. That's part of what we
introducing with break to market. We started with doing advertising, seeing like, like advertising this huge moneymaker online, it's how business moves a lot, most of it online is through advertising. And we need to, you know, come up with a better way of doing that. And so being
the web browser, all this noise around data collection and harvesting is all because you've got a lot of different parties trying to match and add to a single person for a slot. Nobody trusts anybody else. All these different vendors are in between that user and that brand that are making that thing happen. A lot of
of data being broadcasted that people you never heard of without any idea of how long they keep it or how far it goes, etc. So what we did was to say, look, like the browser knows what you're doing. The browser has the browsing history. The browser is, you know, all the pages you navigated on through the browser. So like, we should just have
actually create a model that works directly on the browser to match advertising to you or other things like news articles, stuff like that, that works just on your device. Kind of how an autonomous car would drive on its own, get you to the destination you want without the rest of the world having to know about it.
So like we started doing that. So we built in, you know, a way to make a system for marketing and advertising that could work with privacy built on with privacy basically in mind as like a key principle. And we launched that in April of 2019. And a part of that was bringing the basic attention token to market
it to. And so creators can verify to be a brea creator and users basically earn that from advertisers as they browse the web and then can pay that to creators and think about 1.7 million content creators that have verified as brea creators with our system
and then millions of users every month that are earning that. But yeah, that's it. And then we sense, you know, so you got search wallet browser. We've got a line of premium products too. So Brave Talk, which is kind of like a Zoom competitor, you brought that to market. And there are a couple of other things. VPN.
product we brought out, we actually just released it on desktop too, so it's available on every OS. And so we have these, you know, ancillary products that on the premium side, you have a lot of crypto business with the wallet and Web 3, and then, you know, we have our core browser and search business too. Awesome.
Awesome. That was that was definitely a great rundown. We would definitely touch upon the bat and kind of that how crypto and it was with the ecosystem a little bit later. Guys, you could definitely check out the Brave Software on Apple or Android, depending on what kind of product you have Apple or Android. It should be in both marketplaces. It is a free download. Obviously, there's a kind of a premium
So you touch upon data and how people were scraping data from users that didn't want to be scraped. Obviously, the kind of still happens today and forging, but that's kind of the world we live in obviously being a data driven economy. What happens to the data that let's say a user like myself will kind of create while surfing on the brave browser? What was that data go to essentially?
Yeah, that's a great question. It goes nowhere. It stays on your browser. One thing that's been big about Brave from the very beginning, and it's kind of a principle that we still live by, like, Brave wants to have a level of, Brave doesn't want to get between you and what you do on the web. So, like, we basically
design. The way our ad system works is all of the algorithms are on the device. They don't broadcast their data back like our certain we want to be in a position where if like something were happened whether it's a hack or breach or an authority where the confiscator
that the software would just run independent of us and that there would be nothing for those authorities to capture that would be include user information or other info that would compromise our user base. And I think that's what separates Brave from a lot of other companies out there is just that our, you know, we think that
the web should be private for everybody, but also open in how people access it and use it. And then it should be up to the users who they share their information with and how they share it. And by default, you should have this connection in place. And so, yeah, like the way our models work is the ad matching things like that all
and locally in your browser. And then the information, we have like a catalog of ads. So you can think about it, imagine you're in the US and we have a set of advertisers that can run to different categories in the US. And so there's a, it's called an ad catalog that gets downloaded. So all of the information
for all the ads gets downloaded to the device and then once it's on the device it's like you have a smart kind of ad server directly on the device. So the device determines which of those ads is the right one to serve at the right time and then serves it to you directly on your phone. So like none of your data leaves from your device. This is all happening. Just like how your browsing history is
is local to your browser. The way that the ad matching works is very similar to that. And then when events happen, you click on an ad or you view an ad or you convert on an ad, we use a zero-knowledge proofs to basically like zero-know-s proof verticals to basically like send marketing events back to the server.
We can account for activity anonymously without having to collect, like that activity to an individual user. So it's really important because a lot of those tracking and the data collection and things like that that happen around advertising is basically accounting. Like a lot of people just want to make sure that
their accounting impressions when they're done because that's whatever tasers tend to pay on and then you know or clicks or whatever. And so we had to build a system where it can account for those events with integrity without like you know linking that back to the individual user which is where the old system kind of falls apart because you've got linkability
on hardware, ID, software, ID, and all that data gets shared across to different parties. All they just show you and add. It's ridiculously excessive, like how advertising works. Most people don't know how it works and most people shouldn't have to know how it works and it shouldn't have to be as complicated as it is.
There's this whole gaming that goes on behind the scenes and it's one of those things where like I would notice the years would go on and you go to like, you know, CNN or other sites and it seemed like the sites just take longer alone and there's more going on the background and it's because there's all these different calls going out to all these different servers with your information to try and
put an ad in front of you. And so from the browser, we can just like pick the right ad directly on the browser to serve you from the browser. And the browser knows what you're doing. So like browser note can can can basically weigh which add the serve you by what you've been browsing and do all this in a private and anonymous way. So that's kind of what we
we brought to market and we don't want to know your information. We do want to know what broader pools of people are thinking. It makes it difficult for us with marketing because most of the time an app would have a bunch of tracking where they would know a lot of specifics about their users but with us it's more
of like we're an open source company and so we use a mix of like surveying and polling where we don't ask for personal information or collect it but we can get enough of the signal back from our audience like to know what they're into which is ultimately what we're trying to find out and then you know not have to collect anything you know that's personal or
links back to a single user. So these are things that we've been driving for a long time and we'll continue to. Awesome, Luke. So I do have some questions here as, you know, Stony and some of the NFT heads came in here, which is awesome to see those guys as well. Because obviously, Luke, I'm sure you're well-versed in the crypto space as well. And, you know, there are numerous, numerous
fishing attempts and fishing success stories that people do here about on a weekly daily monthly basis. So obviously the brave browser as a layer of privacy for the user which is very attractive to everybody. I guess if you surf the web, especially now with scale how often people use chats, if you're a how often people use other things
and the internet to kind of serve whether go NFT shopping, you know, crypto purchasing, you to swap and all these other browsers, you know, a Dex and you know, sex, whatever it may be. Luke, is there is there an edit and let's say added layer of security to the browser as well. So let's say someone would click on a link that obviously is a fishing link with that kind of combat and prevent the user from getting
hacked or scammed or is it just kind of go through this system in ways and it's just to a fault? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's a mix of things, right? With Brave, Web3 is part of the broader web. That's accessible, right? So we have like safe browsing protection and other things just
kind of baked into the browser. One thing a team is working on are there are a bunch of different like it kind of like how you have ad block filter lists where there's different versions and different options out there. Some of the things happening with like fishing and other like crypto like scam links
and stuff like that. I think one of the big security ones you get with a browser is the wallet itself is in the native browser code. So it's kind of isolated in sandbox within the core browser code versus an extension where there have been cases where people think that they're downloading the
extension, it turns out it's a fake extension that somehow got through and then they're in a world of hurt. Or, you know, there's other, the amount of information that extensions get to see is a lot, right? Like so, so what we're trying to do is like have a native wallet that's more secure and just part of the secure private
browser and then also building other security features into that. A lot of this comes down to our approach too. Whenever we work on the wallet and introducing a new feature, there's extensive security and privacy reviews we go through and we're always trying to design for
the best security principles possible. And in form users, when there is any change in behavior or there's something you need to look out for or hey, realize when you authorize this to have to do something, this is what it means. Those types of things are pretty built into brave. And then there's also
So, you know, we have some signing differences without a transaction to be signed that helped to kind of surface the security features to. I think there's a lot of work to be done here. The space is so new that like a lot of times like not having standards around a lot of things like wallets and other areas can cause
and paper cuts, but we're trying to stay ahead of it as much as possible. And I think like what we did with bringing ad blocking and tracking protection to the browser, we're trying to do it with the wallet too. And we've been able to grow that brief reward so much that with a few clicks, people are passively earning crypto, and we're trying to apply it
a lot of those learnings towards self custody because we're big believers in, you know, Web 3 and self custody in the browser and users like holding their own token. All that awesome. Yeah. So obviously with with the Lera and the belief in self custody, there has to be that layer of, you know, us knowing what we do and why we do it and how to do it. And obviously, you know,
I'm not sure if you're wondering what the security aspect of that self-clusity aspect. To your point, I really do believe that the concept of a privacy browser privacy setting is very, very new. I mean, there's numerous people that I talk to in daily basis. And some people are just kind of learning about the concept of privacy browser and didn't know that it existed. And I think if there's a function now, a functionality,
I think for you know the crypto and NFT space at scale the blockchains base at scale that would allow users to interact and kind of you know have the whole wall concepts and for them to potentially somehow I'm not sure how those would happen to APIs but somehow potentially detect or kind of see that this link is insecure not secure before
they click on it or maybe even asking them to make sure before they click on it officially to ask them a pop-up come up maybe you know asking them are they sure they want to click on this link something to that nature to you know obviously to avoid had scale the this fishing attempts at that happen I think in a pretty often basis um Stoney we do appreciate you tapping in with us today do you have any questions for Luke as of right now
Hey, thanks for bringing me up. Yeah, he did answer some of them. I didn't want to ask a couple of them. I like the fact that all our data is sandbox and how the algorithm works to give us back the ads. So that I did not know that. I like the verified ads. I'm trying to get for my business. I'm trying to see if there's going to be like a program to
get in or you could try it out, test it out, but then from what you're saying is it makes sense that you have to have verified companies to add on there because the last thing you want is malicious fishing sites. So you did answer that one. I think that's it for now. I'm about to head into a dead zone right now, but I'll hold on to
question for not if you guys could continue. Thank you, though. No worries. I'd just to follow on that stony. We actually just launched a a cell server program for for brave ads last week. And I can DM you the link to that in case you all are interested in joining that. But yeah, like we we have a process like there's everything
do with the software, right, like, and protections built in there. But even how our advertising policies work, like there's certain categories of advertising that we don't run, there's going to be controversial. But on the other end, we also, like, crypto advertising we have from the very beginning because we want the space to grow.
So we have like different processes for advertising different things on Brave. It's always kind of comes down to like making sure that well, there's a level of trust that users put in our brand, right? Like because we've been out there for as long as we have been and we have to always make sure especially on the marketing side that we're
you know, not violating that trust and that we're doing, you know, you've got to be doing what you're practicing, what you're preaching, especially in this space, or you're just going to lose all your users. And like, we have questions about that too, like, what would happen, like, you know, like, what's keeping you guys from doing that things as you get larger and larger? And I think, like, that's the#
of it like being open source is like it's super important. Listening to user feedback is really, really important. We take all this to heart. We send links feedback, we get back to the team, we do a lot of user testing and stuff like that too. But if we don't like, if we violate our own mission here, then we should have never started it.
the beginning and I think that that would come out quickly in the product too. I wouldn't blame anybody for leaving if we broke our promises to users, but we put a ton of work in and process in to not break those promises to our users and to release new features and make those processes flexible enough to where we can apply them
as new technology comes out because like, you know, coming from 2016 to now, like the space, Web 3 Space changed so much, but also just like technology evolves, right? Like, never static. So, you know, we don't want to like make people feel like they're missing out on anything, but, so we don't want to break the web, but we want to make it as private.
Yeah, I just want to say one more thing. I love the brave browser. I love what you just said. I've been an active user since 2018. And I think right now, you know, you guys have the chance to, you know, bridge that UI UX issue for the Web2 users coming in hopefully next year.
you have a chance to capitalize on that since having one browser, everything all, basically you would have like a malware bytes incorporated inside the browser, you'd have a delegate.cash type of version or warm wallet version in the backend in the crypto wallet. There's lots of
I feel like that would be easier for people coming in. It could be difficult to understand crypto and then be like, hey, I need a download Meta Mask which could be a malicious link, someone downloads. But if everything's in-house, it makes it so easy to make. Just come in one foot.
That's awesome. And 100% agree with that too. That's one thing I've noticed in the space. And they started messing around Bitcoin in 2015. But user experience has been kind of on the back burner for the space in general.
It seems like it's even getting more so as like alt-use and other things come out that should things get more and more complicated But you know, I'm pretty bullish on things getting more abstracted and easier to use over time But I think that's a great area for Brave to come in is to work on just making this super simple perp
I mean, making Web 3 accessible and easy use. I think there's other work to you in our wall team's working on right now. Basically bringing in your, because users in the browser can save payment methods in their web browser and a lot of people do.
If we can move those same payment methods right into the wallet that we have in Brave, then just by being within proximity of crypto and more standard traditional payment methods, like you're going to get more people kind of into crypto just organically like that.
But everything should be in one wallet. And it should be easy to use. And it opens up the door for a lot of really cool things. Like one clicky commerce and other things like that. Because the browser has your information already saved there. Like there's a ton of wins we can bring to usability. All these things where people
people in the past would say, "Oh, you've got to sacrifice, you've got to trade off privacy or security for convenience." And I think what we're trying to do now, like this year, especially, is we've got a lot of different things built, like in our stack. Like we need to connect and tissue all them together
with programs and ways that people can do cool things and expanding rewards and other things like that. I think you're going to be key because the more that we can do that and link these different pieces together, we're really delivering value to users and then it's also we've got to have
users that stay with Brave because they like it. And it's kind of that answer to like, okay, well, my options are big tech, A, B, and C. And then there's Brave that, you know, building stuff for me. That's kind of what we're aiming to do. And then we've been doing, but great question.
Thanks so much. I appreciate you tapping in and asking some great questions. Luke, I have a question that is, it kind of related to Big Tech and this may be a little bit controversial for some, but I think having, you know, good dialogue is I think it's great for both sides, regardless of kind of where you are. I was, you know, Big Tech has had a role in kind of, you know, sense
I guess the government quote unquote wanting to have access to the data to the users that are using the obviously internet whether there's kind of browsing just for fun whether they're doing it for research homework business activities or even kind of in a kind of mal and ill will tend do you guys kind of come forward
to what they say in terms of collecting that data or is that all the window in terms of your processes? Yeah, no. All of our stuff is on our website. Can you guys hear me?
Okay, cool. The little talking icon went away, so I'm just double checking. Yes, so all the policies are on brave.com. I think it's brave.com/privacy or if you go to the footer, it's there. It's pretty light compared to others. But yeah, like we, like I said before, we don't want to know who our users are, so we don't collect our data. Anything that has to#
Process is like for example like anti fraud checks and other stuff like that or information is needed to power certain services like we try to throw that information out as soon as possible. Our whole goal is to not do those things right like the web should be open.
should be navigable by anybody regardless of what they want to see or believe in or what their positions on anything are like the free flow of information is like critical like for societies and you know Braille does not want to get in the way of that like we've stayed very very neutral like as far as like
politics or even moderation, anything like that goes. And you basically, as long as it's not promoting violence or things like that, we stay out of the way. So we always aim to do that. And you're never going to get something that's completely biased free, but we
want it to be as neutral as possible from our point of view. That's awesome, Luke. Yeah, I definitely, I definitely, you know, how can I say this? I definitely, you know, believe in what you guys believe in in terms of being powered back to the user, allowing them to do and kind of roam at room for you without, you know, getting their data scraped and getting kind of violated on, you know, the internet from a#
So let's dive into the bad ecosystem and how that plays into the ecosystem of Brave. For those that don't know, guys, this is not financial advice. This is for education awareness purposes only. Brave does have a token called BAT. Luke, I would love for you to dive into BAT and how it operates with the ecosystem and how it fits into the entire piece of the project.
So that is the basic attention token. We launched it on Ethereum in May 31st of 2017. There are 1.5 billion that were created. That's all the bad things.
right now about over 99% or over 90% of its encirculation at this point. But the whole point of the token is to be a unit of account for attention in the ecosystem. And you think about it this way. Let me go talking about earlier. All these different, you know, third parties collected
your data, they're all doing it partially for accounting and then other firms do for other reasons. But when you're blocking all that third party tracking, like you want to have a way that can make the system accountable and transparent without having to go down that route of
companies having to collect that information from users. And so when we saw what was happening on Ethereum with tokenization of different utilities and things like that, like attentions, the utility, the attention economy, and the user first attention economy that we're building at Braim is it was a great case for us to plus we had been using Bitcoin
And we ran into some problems in the wild. I mean, like so much of crypto talk is done in the abstract, especially on the research side, whereas like some of the stuff we've been doing has been in production, right? Like, and we saw firsthand, like when the block size words were happening and also just like kind of with partners
and the chain, how much that can screw with your business model and how scaling is important there. We saw it was having the Ethereum, we said, "Okay, look, our model basically works like this with the initial utility case." So advertisers buy campaigns, they can buy them in US dollars
or in bat. If they buy them in US dollars, we buy bat for the user revshare that we bring out. But basically like when a user sees an ad, 70% of the revenue from the advertiser gets rewarded to the user in bat. And then break keeps the other 30%. And so we're
We're introducing a model here where advertisers feel it with spend for their campaigns and then users earn that from that and then users can keep their bat or withdraw it or they can pay forward to content creators that they enjoy. We have options for all of those. We even have like inline tipping in Twitter
and then reddit. And so whether you have a YouTube channel, a Twitter account, Reddit account, Fimeo account, or website, or Twitch account, there's a long list of channels that we support. You can go verify those channels and accept that from users and brave that are earning it. And so we
We launched, we had, we switched over everything from Bitcoin to that within six months of our token launch. So I think it was October 2017, we cut over to that from Bitcoin. And then in April of 2019, we launched our ad
platform. So users could begin to earn bat from advertisers that were putting systems in or putting campaigns in. We've watched thousands of campaigns since. We had between 8 to 10 million users a month earning bat and 1.7 million contact creators that have verified to accept bat from our users.
It's one of those things where especially like in the bull market I would talk to like a lot of my neighbors and kind of become kind of this crypto consignory that's helping everybody buy during the bull run, the uncles, cousins, whatever But one of the things that stood out with people were saying well I get
your guys' use case because you have a browser and an average has in the browser like rewarding me, I totally get that. I don't get a lot of the other use cases but I get what you're doing at Brave with that. And what interesting thing with that is that as a platform scales and adoption scales, more and more, a bad fractional back-its and circumstances,
But what's been really cool to see too is that since that is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, we started to see the market like adapting back utility in other cases. So for example, MakerDow back in, I think it was late 2019, early 2020, started
to add other tokens to Maker and that was one of the first ones that was added and then we started seeing that added and compounded and defy and in ABE and in another because there were a lot of people holding that and earning that like it was kind of found its way into DeFi organically through secondary markets and then
We started to work with gaming companies but we noticed that you know open to get out of the option for you are c20 tokens to mint nfts and so we're like okay, let's see what we can do with that We started partnering with some blockchain gaming companies like gala games and splinter lands etc and they started to make a nfts that you could mint with that
in the game and we thought that's really cool like let's we ran into some scaling problems again where it became cost prohibitive for a lot of people to participate in some cases and other cases even just like all the authorizations just kind of tally up but but that was basically finding utility in secondary cases that
We're ones that we even thought of when we made the white paper and that's one of the things I love about this space is that you know, it's since the times since our launch to now like we're the 13th most Distributed token on Ethereum by on chain holders and one thing we've been doing with with our multi chain wallet going to market is is taking back
cross-chain too. So we did a mint on Fawon or last November in the middle of just that whole blood bath of like FEX, Nukeying and the market just kind of going free fall. We're like, screw it. We're going to do a we're going to do our in a team and so we did a mint where you're on with with Adam Apen and
the back community where you can mint entities with that or with soul on tolana and we minted out the whole collection in like three hours or something like that and we're doing more of those collaborations where you can get to use that we see there being like a whole attention economy with that that will go this and
What we see with these little gates of advertising was a big one to go after because with advertising not only is it power or the web with monetization But it also is one of the biggest problems on the web with smart privacy goes like privacy invasion etc So we went to that but then the market does what the market does and it starts to create other use cases and what I'm pretty much
bullish about is a potential for us to take rewards to another level and provide the option for people to potentially get discounts on products just by using the browser with that where we could, let's say you could potentially apply your user revshare towards product discounts for things you buy.
like that where you get huge convenience wins and it expands utility that way. But we're going to do more NFT collapse this year on different chains. But I think like the main thing to think about with us is that like we're not limited to one network and we never will be and we're trying to make one three accessible to everybody. So we're pretty
blockchain agnostic to you. Everybody has got their own biases. I certainly have my own, but I think that one of those things that can inhibit growth a lot is tribalism and people, which it's also necessary for growth. So there's kind of a balance there, but I think from a platform perspective with Brave, it's important
that we not get in the way and that we make all this stuff accessible for people. So that's basically our take on it. So you're not going to like, I might show favoritism in some of my tweets for certain things, mainly the stuff that works and is showing promise, but the company is staying agnostic to this.
these things for good reason. And I think like as our as a platform, one thing we we should be this gateway, but we're not going to try and over engineer like a certain trendy thing when we could actually focus on like supporting more of the foundational things that go hot and cold and catch bits of revenue where we can basically. That helps.
Awesome. Thank you. Definitely lots to unpack there. Guys, be sure to check out brave.com to kind of look more in depth to a Luke kind of spoke about there in the bat token as well as a reward system. Luke, there's personally something that I kind of want to get into you know a little bit more. I know. I know. You hear me or not. Luke, can you hear me?
Let me send them a DM see Twitter. It's definitely acting up again. You want Hey, Luke. Can you hear Andrew that did I fall out?
so i'm not sure he can hear you are that let me let me send him a dm you know guys we have to think of it i'm gonna try to jump off if you have i don't know if you can hear me look but if you jump off and try to jump back on that typically solves the issue but it's been a problem with twitter recently
Let me let me let me let me say guys, you know, we we pay we pay more than we should for Twitter blue and this is still occurring crazy. Let me let me send him a let me send him a text
you guys probably heard me typing, but I was part of the process. Hopefully Luke joins back. Guys, we do appreciate your support. We had technical difficulties in start this space and now towards the end of it, we're also having problems. I guess they say, you know, start the way you finish or finish the way you start, whichever way you want to kind of phrase that, which is great. So, need you have any questions or
Call him if you find bring Luke back up he literally just requested right now. We'll get a much I got him really quickly as well. Luke welcome back. We had some difficulties once again. I want to have one of these were actually works. We pay so much a month for you know Twitter blew it and the space is still are.
I will say that as well. Obviously the future blockchain is multi-chain. I see blockchains as a form of distribution, the way that Walmart and all these other big chains are also distributions. I think blockchain is similar to the sort and will probably go that way in the near future as things get more digitized and whatnot. I went and rambled there as well. Luke, I kind of want to talk about the
content creator side of things we have a lot of creators in the space I think we have some of the most talented creators in the space and if he's space block chain space crypto space how do you want to kind of call it? Luke can you kind of explain the process of how you guys kind of pick these creators is there a submission form? What do you guys kind of look for in these creators? How do they get monetized is a limited to what is a limited#
TikTok and maybe Facebook is their Twitter creators are you guys looking at let's say maybe Twitter creators that utilize spaces because there are a bunch of space hosts in here that that do a great job on a daily basis as well as know what does Arles does ours germ germ my down below also hosts his there are a lot of spaces in a space host that do a lot of great content type stuff is
They didn't kind of impact that process there for us Luke in terms of how would it take to be a creator on the platform and kind of the submission process. There is one because many people like to kind of, you know, scale up their content creation skills as well as the platforms that there are just are beating on. I think kind of near, you know, simplifying that process for a lot of people so they can kind of imagine themselves in that process doing that#
And obviously applying would be, I think, a phenomenal thing to do. Yeah, I know that's a great question. So it's super easy. Go to creators.brave.com. And you can kick off the process there of verifying your channels. You can verify one or many channels. And when we initially started it, it was
Web domains only and then we offered like WordPress plugins etc. Then we added YouTube. So if you have a YouTube account, you can verify that with us and then we added I think Vimeo Twitch and then we started to add inline tipping so on Reddit and on Twitter.
Twitter, you can verify both of those accounts as well and people can send you tips directly in the browser on Twitter and on Reddit, etc. So any of those channels are available. I think we did it at a time where it kind of coincidentally
It was when YouTube started to demonetize creators a lot and then we've seen happen even further beyond that has been how the algorithms basically started to make it harder to find that content too. And so what we're doing is a mix of things now. We have these channels where you can earn that from
users, which is great. There's no high bar there, you just go verify and then follow the process. I think what's really interesting is what Web 3 brings to all of this and that we've got 1.7 million creators that have signed up so far.
How can we start to introduce web 3 monetization web 3 tools and open up this new world to them because in a lot of cases People's creators first experiences with crypto were with brave and bat like they hadn't gotten that familiarity But it's an easy way for them to get familiar because they keep putting up their
content just like the normally would and then all of a sudden they start seeing that showing up in their account. So it's kind of a nice way in that doesn't require reinventing the wheel or too much overload as far as starting something new goes. But I think this can get a lot more interesting to you.
especially with Web 3 where you've got this whole class of NFT creators now that weren't here when we started all this. And how can we better support them? And I think that initially starts with having first class support for NFTs. And so there's an interesting stuff we're doing on that front right now. I can share with you all.
Well, some of this stuff is live now in Brave and our Nightly channel. So there is a release channel you get that's nice and polished and has been battle tested. That's what you get when you go to the Play Store and download Brave or you go to Brave.com and download the browser. But then we also have a beta channel
the browser that's a few versions behind or ahead of the release channel. And then we have the Nightly channel, which is basically the master branch from GitHub that's merged every night. And it's the most risky one to browse on. But if you ever want to get a glimpse into what's coming in the future with Brave, people can go in test nightly. And the whole point of these things is you've
the different channels that have, you know, between 8 to 10,000 testers that are testing these channels for you and giving you feedback so then as it goes through the process, you're by the time something lands in that main release, it's really polished. So on nightly, like bringing it back to the point, in the wallet and brave
There's some pretty interesting stuff that just landed. One feature called NFT penning has landed so in one click you can basically the wallet will pin a bit. You can think of it as a backup. So it'll pin the artwork or image or whatever that on you, especially with the NFT to IPFS as a bit.
backup. So like you can basically automatically pin all of your NFT arts to IPFS just with the wallet with very little work, pretty much no work, other than clicking the button, which it gives people a piece of mind too because there have been a lot of cases where the artwork goes missing or it changes or
or whatever. And so we're trying to kind of like apply this first class support. The other thing we're doing is we're adding auto discovery for NSTs. And there's a there that's in nightly as well on desktop. Both these features I'm talking about are on desktop now in nightly. And so one thing we've seen a lot of is like we had it so you could
add NFTs, it was a manual process, it's really brutal. These new features will just automatically show them up in the browser while it, which is useful. And so we're starting there and then what was thinking about like how can we use like NFTs with creators in ways whether it's like
access to chat rooms or to break talk or other things. And then also, how can we tie this in within the ecosystem too? So because we have an ad platform, you can really see a cool loop happening where creators can basically that are verified can participate in our ads platform.
and grow their audience within Brave and then users like all this affinity all happening around within the Brave ecosystem. This is all stuff we're actively going after right now. A lot of it kind of like plan and wait or plan and test and see how things go like the numbers with Brave are a lot bigger than
and other applications. So with us, there's always a little bit more measuring twice with things because if you ship something and especially stuff that's related to wallet, it's not like you're shipping a browser feature, people have funds in their wallet, you want to make triple sure that everything is
in a good state there before you do a broad deployment in those types of things. So yeah, I think what we can do is be a really great gateway to creators for how to get into Web 3. Be a place where Web 3 creators can also verify too. I think that's something that we're working on as well. And then also like
So, brands, during the last bull run, you started to see brands experimenting with NFTs. While some of this stuff is known or in front of everybody's face right now, brands are still interested in this stuff. And one thing that Brave has done is we position ourselves as like a technical
I kind of help them learn about these things and experiment with them and build them tooling to help with that type of thing too. So I think what we can do is be that gateway like for users but also for creators for how to get into web 3 or how to do cool stuff once you're in web 3 and I think that there's a whole element with like AI stuff that's coming out and how to where you're going to start
So, you know, we're seeing power tools for creators coming out and there's potentially like, break could be a good surface for discovery for that type of thing too. But, you know, we're, we're, we're not trying to overplay in here and definitely trying to kind of like keep shipping as we go. Awesome. And Luke, just to kind of verify that was creators.brave, correct?
Yeah, create yourself very much awesome guys. Sure check that stuff out. Look, I know we are kind of wind down the hour. I do appreciate your time and obviously my apologies on behalf of Twitter, not that I'm affiliated by any means of the technical. I do have some questions and I'll pass them back to Stoney or know if you kind of want to, you know, and this off with some questions as well. That's really cool. I do#
two more questions. Luke, kind of top of your head, I know this is really off the whim. Are there any larger creators with more notoriety that currently using the platform, the creator platform? Yeah, I think one big one with the PDF has been verified creator for years and they get a lot of contributions through our user base.
If I recall correctly, I think Mr. Beast was talking about it two well ago and then you know others like We see just a lot coming in we list some of them on the base again to token site and then there's also community Operated site I try to remember it off if you go to brave.com for as trans
There's a link for the creator section. I think it's bravebat.info. I'm probably butchering it. But like, it's a site where all the creators are listed that a community put together and you can kind of sort through there too. But I think there's more to come on that front tube in the months ahead. We have some stuff that's pretty interesting that we're working on.
Awesome. Yeah, so I'm a personal belief that I've every platform that kind of you know becomes a relevant I guess the TikToks of the world the you know the vines the Twitter the Instagram when Instagram came up before the entire you know the entire bot thing that transpired there I believe in first movers advantage first movers advantage guys Luke I mean so that's kind of why I'm asking these questions because there are we have a lot of talented influencers in town#
the ecosystem, what it need dependent on USD or any other currency, just that. Yeah, that's a great question. And I think like we've always given them the option mainly because, especially when we launched, you know, like crypto is new to businesses. I mean, there's some
Web 3 businesses are separate, but it's a small slice of the overall pie, right? Like in crypto, I mean, anybody watching Twitter today, like you're seeing how difficult it can be for even crypto companies to operate in the US. So there's always been some concern. That's said,
I mean, like we have a lot of advertisers that pay with that. So what we've done is we leave the option open for advertisers to pay with either. And then if they pay with dollars, the 70% rem share that goes to the users, we actually buy off the market, like Brave makes a bad purchase for 70% from those dollar campaigns.
And then we distribute that back to the users. With self-serve, we're working on the payment portal for that now. There will be an option to pay with credit card, debit card, or pay with that. We're going to do the same thing with Fiat purchases then. And where we'll buy back for the user
share. But one thing we're doing and we did this with the self-server program launch is the first campaigns that participants in the program, if they pay with that, we're going to give them like a 50% discount. And I think as you see, self-server roll out as a fully functioning product, aside from after it grows out of the program, like, well,
have evergreen discounts for paying with that. It's one of those things where if you force them to only pay with that, you're going to shut out a lot of the addressable advertisers, but what we can start doing is making it almost stupid not to pay with that because the incentive is good enough.
or we can build in things like loyalty discounts for advertisers that pay with that over X consecutive months, things like that, like where we can gamify it a bit. But I think going fully in there, and one other thing too that I'll just say is like if you go to brave.com/transparency, whenever we make a bad purchase,
We post it and post the amount to so that we you know can be transparent about these things with with our users and with the broader community. So I think like it is I don't see it happening where we'll completely cut it out. I don't think that we want to do that either because
You know, even even now it's like a lot of folks don't understand how crypto works, but they might want to reach our audience and we want to give them an opportunity to do that and then everybody that we bring in it opens an opportunity for them to learn about web 3 and crypto like so we take advantage of that too. I think like one thing that's interesting about
advertising with Brave is that we give advertisers a lot of access to teams and people that wouldn't normally get access to because we're building new products and we're building a new platform in a new way of advertising and our product teams and engineers want to hear from the customers and so it's almost like they're kind of
helping us to build it to you in a way. I mean that's why we're doing this like self-superprogramm, what we're doing is that like our ad platform was launched as kind of this managed service where there was like a $10,000 minimum spend requirement. We've dropped that down to a thousand like for self-server, we're trying to bring in more small and mid-side businesses
into this so that we can work directly with you so that we can make sure that we're giving them the features that they want. We want to make it so that there's no doubt that they want to spend money with Brave and that helps to token the helps to community that helps us keep the light on. So like, yeah, some of the helps like the context. These are work to me, it would be all bad. And it would all be on training and#
You know everything we we mapped in 2016 2017 in the white paper the unfortunate reality is that like you know too much after a token sale the SEC started talking about crypto when they hadn't and Based on the congressional committee hearings today you can see how difficult it is for businesses to stop
in this space that want to be clean like we do and above board. I hope this situation with the regulators and the US gets better soon, but it's been years and it's only gotten more murky from my own point of view. So hopefully things like this bring a little bit more.
We stop trying to self-run ourselves in the US when we are in a great position to bring innovation in this technology to the world. Yeah, anyway, there's my rant. Luke, that was a great term. I think I'm going to coin that and probably still from you. You'll probably hear another space you're going to be in probably in the next couple of weeks, months, self-prog'd.
I still live from Dr. Nicky, but I think it's only fair because you still I can steal it from you than someone else will steal it from me, which is ideally what? Hey, it's still been with everybody in Sherry. The butterfly effect is in full effect.
Luke, obviously I will give you the mic. We appreciate you stopping by here today. Talk about the brave one you guys kind of believe within your ecosystem and the infrastructure of crypto and of the creators economy and all that great stuff. You have the mic, final thoughts, anything that we didn't touch upon today. We didn't ask, we didn't ask any questions to talk about. You don't have the mic.
Yeah, no, it's great. I really want to appreciate the invite here and the ability to talk to you while my DMs are open. You all have my profile here. Like, please, if you've run any issues or you have thoughts or there's ways we can make the product better, reach out. I'm on Twitter all the time. Like, I accept the internet.
and experience it firsthand. And we have a search engine, browser, wallet, all this good stuff, and we have an ear open and want to make it usable for everybody. So yeah, I think that's pretty much it. And thank you guys again for the opportunity and yeah, really appreciate it.
Thank you guys. I will say to a luxe point, the product is free. So free to download it is a free product. I use it on a daily basis as a privacy browser guys. Be sure to check that out as well. Be sure to follow Luke as I said. Stoney appreciate you coming up on President Dilly and ask asking some great questions. We always encourage our listeners. Our viewers, our consumers come up and ask us great questions. We#
guys. Please be sure to follow all the speakers as well as Luke. I'll check out brave.com. We appreciate you guys stopping by with us today despite the technical difficulties and kind of hanging out with us today on a Tuesday, which was like a Friday, but it's a Tuesday. We always appreciate our community, our fans, our consumers, guys. This has been an episode of Wheelcoinc Talk. I'm Andrew Ford, tell your host for tonight.#