The Basic Attention Token is an Ethereum-based token that can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform, a new Blockchain based digital advertising system. User attention is privately monitored in the Brave browser and publishers are rewarded accordingly with BATs. Users also get a share of BATs for participating.

Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC20 token. The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.  

Team

• Brendan Eich - Founder: Co-founded Mozilla &Firefox, created JavaScript
• Brian Bondy - Co-Founder: Khan academy, Evernote, Mozilla
• Yan Zhu - Security & Privacy Engineering: EFF Fellow, Yahoo, Tor project, Privacy Badger
• Scott Locklin - BAT Smart Contracts & Economics: Co-founded Kerf Software, machine learning
• Bradley Richter - Brand & Interaction Design: EFI/Fiery, Co-creator: eBeam & Luidia
• Catherine Corre - Communications: AOL, Netscape
• Brian Brown - Go-to-market: Co-founded Joyent, Deputy Editor WSJ

The BAT ICO managed to hit their funding cap of 156,250 ETH within a record breaking 24 seconds. Only 2222 investors held BAT as of 5/6/17. 184 unique addresses took part and to raise the approximate $36,000,000, with some participants paying transactions fees well over $1000 in one case up to $6,000. The largest single investment was 20,000 ETH which at the time was worth around $4.7m.