Looking into the Fall of BATs Price and Brave Browser

TL;DR Brave Browser has been a favorite choice of the crypto and Web 3 communities for paying out its users in its native token BAT. However, BAT is now at its lowest price in over a year giving up the gains it made earlier this year. A huge factor in BAT's price is the amount of BAT Brave buys back each month to distribute. This year the amount of BAT bought back has slumped considerably resulting in less demand and the price tumbling.

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Brave Browser has been and continues to be one of the go-to web browsers for cryptocurrency and Web 3 users. While Brave itself is not a Web 3 browser itself it does function as a bridge between Web 2 and Web 3 a role that not many others are able to do with the ease and simplicity that Brave has accomplished. The browser Brave offers is in itself worthy of use because of the protection/antitracking features built-in including Brave News, Brave Search, and Brave Talk.

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One of the things though that was supposed to really help set Brave apart was their crypto Basic Attention Token or BAT. Since Brave prevents most website tracking and ads the BAT program allowed users to opt in to receive X amount of ads an hour and in return you would be awarded BAT. For a while, it was a fantastic way to make $4-$5 a month doing your web browsing on Brave but times have really changed especially over the course of this year. For those who are unaware of how BAT rewards were decided/generated when advertisers would pay Brave for the ads that users opted in for 70% of the money received was then distributed to participants in the form of BAT. Since almost all if not all BAT is in circulation this meant that Brave was buying back BAT on the open market to distribute to users.

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Since BAT relied on ad revenue for these buybacks and distributions there were issues that would occur often due to the price volatility. Not to mention since I had used Brave since they gave me a referral code that would either give me $7 USD or $7 in BAT to having over 50 million monthly users the growth has been insane. Typically this would be balanced out by more people, more regions, and more advertisers however with businesses and the economy in a mess this line of thinking goes out the door.

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As a result of an economy that in many areas and businesses are struggling one of the first things that will get cut or reduced is advertising budgets and this has happened according to almost any public company who has released their numbers. Without that revenue, the Brave team faces an issue of either not being able to buy back as much BAT or relying on BAT prices falling and then being able to buy back the BAT they need. Luckily for us, Brave is transparent with a lot of its information, especially considering they are a centralized entity and posts about its BAT buybacks.

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Here is the graph of Brave BAT buybacks

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Currently, the data they provide only goes up until June but that gives us more than enough data to quickly see the issue. Brave is not buying back near the amount of BAT it used to. In fact, in May they did not buy back a single BAT token. This calendar year they have only bought back 8.03 million BAT compared to roughly 13 million BAT in the same time frame as last year. In the same time frame as well except for a single month they bought back at least 1.9 million BAT and this year while January had over 3 million bought they have all been less than 1.5 million BAT except for June.

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BAT depends on Brave buying it back as really that is where its value lies. It is not a crypto that really has utility anywhere so often people are really just stuck with it for the most part. In the last year, Brave has worked on this by announcing partnerships but so far they have not really paid off. However, it may just take some time for these partnerships to really kick in and pay off. Without Brave buying back more BAT, the price is likely going to remain depressed and since the money to buy back comes from ad campaigns and the world's economic health is poor this is not likely.

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While BAT might not be worth much if anything in the long haul that does not mean Brave Browser itself has anything wrong with it. Brave is still a fantastic browser with all of the security-enhancing features that are built in but if you only want to use it to generate BAT then it might be a while before you see significant gains.