The Brave crypto browser has received widespread acceptance and downloads in the web browser industry, as the platform has hit 20 million users per month. This is just one year after the first Brave 1.0 was released.
Brave was launched in 2016. However, it waited until three years later for its first 1.0 release. This time last year, the browser had about 8 million monthly active users. This means the number of active users per month has more than doubled since last year.
Brave revealed that the numbers of its iOS users have almost doubled since Apple allowed other non-apple browsers to be used as default options for users.
One major feature of the Brave browser is that it doesn’t tolerate ads, as it instantly blocks almost all unsolicited ads on the browser.
According to Brave developers, this is why the browser has become trusted and more popular for users. It blocks all ads apart from the Brave-powered advertisements, which also requires the consent of the users. As it stands, Brave has completed about 2,200 ad campaigns from more than 450 companies, with over 2 billion ad confirmation events. Yet, the browser doesn’t allow advertisers to flood the user’s page with unsolicited ads. Brave said its efficient ad campaign has led to an increase in the number of users. The browser claims it has a 9% click-through rate, which is higher than other industry browsers.
But despite Brave’s tremendous progress, Firefox and Chrome are still the industry leaders, with Chrome hitting 220 million active monthly users and taking 66% of the market.
Brave also boasts of its cryptocurrency, known as the Basic Attention Token (BAT), used as a reward for content creators.
As it stands, the content creators have received about 26 million of the crypto tokens. At the token's current market price (18 cents), about $4.6 million worth of the BAT tokens has been sent from users.
Maintaining private-by-default standard
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Brave, Brendan Eich, said the company is doing well because of its approach to maintain as little surveillance as possible. The new web ecosystem Brave is providing offers more privacy and the ability to control their browsing experience.
"Users are fed up with surveillance capitalism, and 20 million people have switched to Brave for an entirely new web ecosystem.”
He further stated that Brave’s goal is to maintain the privacy-by-default standard, which has spurred the company to its present level of success.
"The global privacy movement is gaining traction, and this milestone is just one more step in our journey to make privacy-by-default a standard for all Web users."
In June, Brave faced criticism for auto-completing some URLs to add referrals. However, Eich said such an incident was an error and not the company's intention to do so.
He explained that a query inspired the autocomplete default, which applied to all browsers at the time. He admitted the whole autocomplete issue was a mistake and said the company has since corrected the issue.
Brave has since released an update that disables the functionality by default.