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).
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.)
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.
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.