Competitive Applications That Also Provide Crypto Rewards Part 1 – Brave and Presearch

The blockchain ecosystem is evolving fast and furious and many decentralized applications are already able to compete with the all time favorites. In this article I'm going to start talking about decentralized applications I use on a daily basis and that I would use even if they didn't provide rewards. The fact that they DO provide rewards makes them even more interesting.

This is the first of a series of articles designed to attract people from outside the system. If this too basic for you, remember to pass it along when people ask you why/how/what to do with crypto.

The first two applications I'm going to talk about are:

• Brave

• Presearch

Brave

The main strength of Brave is privacy.

It blocks Google and Facebook from accessing our information, even when the visited websites explicitly setup the code for it. It blocks Google ads both from web and videos natively, saving time and bandwidth. Load speed is a lot better thanks to this implementation.

Have you ever setup a music video list and need to come back again and again to skip the ads? Well, not on Brave.

The native search engine is Duck Duck Go, which retrieves different results from Google and oftentimes more accurate—specially in spicy subjects. For search I'm using Presearch, for more details keep reading.

One interesting detail is that it offers both the possibility to open a regular private window or a Tor private window in two clicks.

The reward system:

Brave offers ads and rewards the viewer with BATs (Brave Attention Token). You can choose to see or not see the ads, and by doing so to enter the rewards system or not. The ads are served locally, none of your information is ever stored in their servers. You can also use a fraction of the rewards to tip your visited sites if they belong to the Creator Network. Now, there is a downsize as a user for this. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, the token suffers from the gas-fee malady, so you need at least 25 BATs to use the coins in any way. I still haven't figured out how much they pay per ad-- if you know anything about it, please let me know in the comments below. The default offer is to change the reward by gift-cards, and the default wallet is Uphold (which might ask for information to setup). I haven't done it yet, so this is as far as I can go explaining the system at this time. It's probably going to be trouble.

All in all, I choose Brave for privacy and speed over the options in the market. The way the BATs grow slowly is rewarding as a feeling, but it's not something I would use Brave for if it were faulty.

Find it here: Brave Browser

Presearch

Presearch is a decentralized search engine that is also privacy oriented and, yes, it gives rewards for searching.

Given the tightening of the knot from Google both in terms of collecting information and curating results, it is evident that those who value their personal information, and prefer to think by themselves, are looking for alternatives.

And alternatives are appearing thanks to decentralization and blockchain. This is very important. I don't think there could be a private company able to compete with Alphabet and not give away their independence to the Tech-conglomerate in the process. But there is power in numbers and the blockchain offers the non custodial organization that is usually lacking in big groups of people.

Presearch page allows to search with Presearch and many other providers, some usual (Google, Youtube...), some not so usual (Duck Duck Go, Coingecko...). The providers can be edited. The easiest way to use Presearch is installing the Chrome application and setting it by default on Brave. The whole process is fairly easygoing starting on their page (link below).

The reward system:

Presearch uses it's own token PRE to charge for ads via keyword staking (this is a very interesting concept, you don't pay, you stake coins to place ads for certain keywords), and to pay searches and affiliates. It is potentially a very lucrative business model, but also very participative because of staking. At the basic tear you will be paid (at this time) PRE 0.12 per search, and you will need around PRE 2000 to be able to move out 1000 (that you can trade or stake). Those are a lot of searches, but, as it happens with Brave, I don't really care. I've done a lot more than that in Google all these years, and I know they made a lucrative business model around me and you and everyone else, but never shared a dime with us. For withdrawing, it proposes to use My Ether wallet, adding the token. I think it could be possible to use Metamask. The token details according to the website are (please verify this information before using it, a mistake will send your coins to Nothingland...):

Address: 0x88A3E4F35D64aAD41A6d4030ac9AFE4356cB84fA

Token Symbol: PRE

Decimals: 18

For those using Atomic Wallet, adding a new token is as simple as to use the ETH address and it will pick up the new token on it's own (after closing and opening the wallet, again check this information before doing it, things change in time).

Find it here (aff link): Presearch

Note: This article was also published in Publish0x. See the mirror article.