It has been along time since I researched Brave and BAT for a post. Back in the day when BAT still a tipping token it was the most popular subject on Publish0x. Forty percent of my posts were about Brave and/or Basic Attention Token as it was a sure way to get the views and tips.
BAT was the reason I came to Publish0x a year ago. It was on the BAT Community Forum that I saw that you could get free BAT from this blogging site called Publish0x. And who doesn't love free stuff. After a couple of weeks of reading the posts, hell I reckon I can do this too. Covid was the perfect excuse to hone up a new skill.
ETH Fee Shock And The Reassessment
With the recent escalation of the Gwei, it was time to reassess our strategy, with regard to ETH and ERC20 tokens. Sit and wait for more clarity.
After a short period we eventually stopped buying the BAT but were still accumulating STORJ, GLM (GNT) POWR and MANA. Conscious of fees, we would build up a big enough stack on Coinspot Crypto Exchange to justify the cost of transferring the ERC20 tokens to our wallet for safe storage.
It is worth noting that the fees on Coinspot used to be roughly x10 what the actual mining fees were. Always a sore point but then they only charged 1% commission. With the hike in mining fees Coinspot absorbed a lot of the increase and were now only x2 the actual mining fees.
The reason we dropped BAT? We had some nagging doubts about BAT and Brave Browser, but couldn’t quite put our finger on it. It wasn’t so much because of the poor performance of BAT’s market value. Though that is probably a side effect. It was more to do with concerns about the Brave Browser and their business model.
And the high cost of Gwei was the perfect excuse to take some action. The BUY becomes a HODL.
The Back Story
It is mid 2020 and Brave announce on twitter that they just bought 400,000 BAT tokens at market. This produced a flood of ill informed conclusions, and misconceptions on Pb0x.
This is how most of my Brave/BAT posts got started, by responding to the misconceptions and ill informed conclusions in the posts comments. Comments are a great way to briefly collate your thoughts, without spending hours researching and writing posts.
But there is only so many times you can comment before you decide a post needs to be written.
ve Buys Back 400,000 BAT June 16 2020
Then Brave announce on Twitter that they had set a new record for the monthly buy back of BAT at market
Brave Sets New New BAT Buy Back Record July 22 2020
Couple of days later Brave set a new record. The month of July had not finished yet and Brave made another buy back of BAT. Brave was on fire.
Brave Updates Their Record BAT Purchases Tally July 25 2020
Now all this record breaking buying back of BAT, which is given back to the Brave Reward users, sounds impressive. Surely the market value of BAT must respond. After all BAT is one of the few altcoins out in the cryptoverse with a real use case and has been up and running for a couple of years. The holy grail of MASS adoption must be just around the corner.
But a quick calculation on a paper napkin, gives a reality check.
Using the figures as of June 16 2020
total purchases for the year 3,361,023 BAT
total circulating supply 1,473,544,645 BAT
there is a capped supply of 1,500,000,000 BAT
only 27,000,000 BAT was left in the User Growth and Development Pools. (Thats the FREE BAT that was used for the referral program etc)
only 0.22809% of the circulating supply is actually being used for its intended purpose. The other 99.77191% is being traded on exchanges or HODL tightly by investors.
24 hour trading volume was $59,863,451 USD (approximately 278,434,000 BAT per day)
average purchases per day 18,467 BAT (approximately 0.006632% of daily trading volume)
5,000,000 active daily Brave Browser users
3,800,000 000 active daily Brave Browser users required for purchases to achieve just 5% of the daily trading volume
The Conclusion Was
Six Months Later Lets Do A Health Check
While the much trumpeted Monthly and Daily Active Users are important. It is the advertising revenue that pays the bills. There are two metrics that really matter
Brave Initiated BAT purchases
Active Advertising Campaigns
Brave Initiated BAT Purchases
That was the easy part, got the data from https://brave.com/transparency/ where all the buy backs transactions are recorded. Just have to add up the monthly amounts and make a pretty graph.
Active Advertising Campaigns
Not so easy, as I had to troll through all the old Brave/BAT posts to find the piece I was looking. I knew I had taken some screenshots.
https://brave.com/transparency/ only shows the current active campaigns. Luckily we have some data from May 30 2020. So we are able to compare then and now.
When Brave was running their referral program they had divided the world into 5 groups. And you were rewarded accordingly.
Obviously we have a very limited data set to work with for this metric.
It appears the Group 1 and 2 have had minimal growth in ad campaigns, compared to the growth in active daily and monthly users.
Group 4 and 5 have seen a large jump percentage wise but they were mostly on 1 active ad campaign. So any growth has to be 100% or greater.
Conclusion
🚩 🚩 (two red flags). Normally it only takes 1 red flag, but I suppose we are emotionally involved and are reluctant to cut BAT loose.
Be interested in other BAT HODlers take on this.
The END
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