This is already the case with Uniswap: https://uniswap.org/blog/ipfs-uniswap-interface/.

Let's see if the underlying economic models can mature to be viable in the "real world," or at least the digital real world. BAT, for example, made Brave possible, but the tokenomics are bad and basically no one uses it.

That said, it is an exciting time, for sure! JavaScript sure has grown from humble beginnings.

What is BAT?

The "native currency" of the Brave browser — you can read more here: https://basicattentiontoken.org/. As the URL implies, the name is "Basic Attention Token" for some reason. Didn't really work out, but has a huge marketcap even though no one uses it: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/.

Market cap is just a function of multiplying total shares by the last share sell price, no?

pretty much, just replace "shares" with "supply".

Interesting

Anyone know why they didn't just use an existing cryptocurrency?

When we launched Rewards (then called 'Payments'), we did so using Bitcoin. During that time, our users would seek to buy about $5 or $10 of BTC at a time. Due to network fees and congestion, these users would pay as much as 90% to fees, and still not be sure when their coins would arrive. This clearly wasn't good for the health and well-being of Brave and Brave "Payments" (now "Rewards").

Our hand was forced, effectively. We needed to pivot to a solution that offered better throughput, with lower fees, or possibly die an early death as a project. Hopping to an ERC-20 token offered immediate relief in both areas, ensuring Brave "Payments" would be able to go on and develop.

Hey Jonathan, big fan of Brave, and I meant no disrespect with my comment.

Serious question — how does BAT distribution work with ETH fees being in the same range now? Have you considered doing atomic swaps with a network like Stellar for a low fee transaction environment? They have a Metamask alternative called Albedo that you could probably effectively integrate into Brave.

I've worked a lot with Stellar and would be glad to help (not shilling, I don't own many XLM, I just know the network well).

Contact in bio if you're interested.

Not him, but there is progress in the Ethereum ecosystem on multiple fronts (in a way that's lacking in Bitcoin), so following that progress seems viable. There are working ERC-20-compatible layer 2 low-fee/instant transfer systems on Ethereum that Brave could use, and Ethereum does have plans being developed for sharding layer 1 transactions which will reduce fees for normal transactions.

(Disclaimer: I'm a bit biased toward Ethereum. I think it's more meaningfully decentralized and I own some eth.)

Always keen to see what's going on in the ETH ecosystem, and I do agree with you on it probably being more meaningfully decentralized.

That said, I was more asking what they're doing right now than what they plan to do in the future (I'm fully aware of ETH 2.0 and all).

I think you're referring to Optimistic Rollups which is now live on Ethereum. It can help BAT in lowering the transaction fees and makes the it faster. Optimistic Rollups is one of the scheduled solutions leading up to Ethereum 2.0 with sharding.

It would have been great if you had switched from BTC to BCH (Bitcoin Cash), as it maintains all the good things about Bitcoin while keeping fees low (<$0.01). That would have been easier than switching to ERC20 tokens, and it would have avoided the same issue happening again with high ETH fees.

Brave made $36M USD from an ICO in the middle of that hype. [0] BAT was a part of that "story." It's just a fish hook. That ICO is what's funding everything.

[0] https://medium.com/faast/brave-ico-review-600-in-6-days-b51d...

edit: added citation