Despite the struggling cryptocurrency market, advertising centered coin Basic Attention Token (BAT) has experienced a price hike of over 20% which has attracted investors to the token as it is a new token that was launched only three months ago.
The attention the token has gotten may be as a result of the company’s different approach to cryptocurrency. The company is out to revolutionize online advertising by removing the need for middlemen in online advertising to allow advertisers maximise rewards from their online ads.
It also intends to reduce online fraud by improving security for advertisers and curbing online tracking for targeted ads among other issues to make advertising safer and more profitable. Before now, advertisers do not gain much from online advertising because the “middlemen” like Google and Facebook claim up to 73% of everything such advertisers earn.
Although it is also working on decentralization like every other blockchain based currency, BAT is focused on decentralizing digital advertising so that promoters do not need monopolizing middlemen to promote their goods or services. Under this arrangement, users get paid for interacting with online ads and promoters get paid for promoting such goods and services.
This is to be achieved by using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain that allow advertisers to send ads to internet users with tokens which the user takes a portion of after viewing the ads. This will be BAT’s means of creating new coins as against the proof-of-work or proof-of-stake used for most cryptocurrencies.
This technology has behind it some major industry giants such as the creator of Javascript, co-founder of Mozilla Firefox Brendan Eich, founder and CEO of Zcash Zooko Wilcox, and Coinbase’s product manager Ankur Nandwani which gives it a good chance of succeeding.
A major advantage to BAT is that its tokens are not meant to be traded or used to store value but they are to be used within the network, an idea that is expected to ensure the price does not rise high and fall very low like other cryptocurrencies do.
The token can also be easily stored on any wallet that supports ERC20 tokens. BAT seems to be solving a real problem which explains why it has gotten really popular raising $35 million in 30 seconds.
Other coins have faced some resistance in terms of regulation and all but BAT may be facing a more fierce opposition from big “middlemen” like Facebook and Google if this succeeds and advertisers start to abandon these companies for the new technology.
