Web Browser Brave to Add Cryptocurrency-Based Twitter and Reddit Tipping

Those thousands of hours you spent crafting witty memes while you should have been doing your algebra homework may finally earn you more than retweets and Reddit karma.


CNET reports that Brave, the privacy-centric web browser launched by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich and funded by an initial coin offering (ICO), plans to roll out Reddit and Twitter tipping to its native cryptocurrency payments system.


After manually enabling the payment system through the browser’s settings page, users will be able to link their social media accounts to their in-browser Basic Attention Token (BAT) wallets and both tip and accept tips from other users.


“The model will be tipping — a user likes a tweet and can give BAT to the tweeter, and optionally tweet back that he tipped,” the company said, adding that the feature would go live later in the year.


As CCN reported, Twitch streamers and YouTube channel operators, along with website owners, can already register as Brave publishers, allowing them to accept BAT payments from their viewers, readers, or fans. Users seeking to reward publishers for quality content can either manually set monthly contributions for individual sites or allow Brave to divide their monthly contribution automatically based on the amount of time that they spent consuming each publisher’s content.


Two months ago, Brave — whose browser blocks ads by default — began trialing a feature that allows users to earn cryptocurrency by opting-in to device-based ads that do not track or expose user data. Over the long-term, Brave plans to allow users to earn 70 percent of the gross advertising revenue raised through this system. Publishers will also receive a portion of that revenue, while Brave will take a small cut as well.


As of July, the company reported that its browser had 3 million monthly active users across all devices and said that it expects to cross the 5 million mark by the end of the year.


Notably, Brave isn’t the only web browser seeking to integrate cryptocurrency into its core services. Last month, Opera announced that it would add a native ethereum wallet to the Android version of its web browser, and just this week the company revealed that users will be able to link their mobile ethereum wallets to their desktop browsers.