Basic Attention Token (BAT) might seem like a unlikely candidate to start a bull run, let alone an even bigger one, but could end up proving invaluable in once again gaining the mainstream interest. To explain why, we first need to know what caused the previous bull run.

During the previous bull run at the end of 2017, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole were getting daily media coverage. CNBC had a “Fast Money Goes Crypto” episode, Forbes & Bloomberg had at least one article on Bitcoin a day, cryptocurrency ads were being aired on national television, and almost everybody was talking about it. This caused the price to increase at an unprecedented rate, getting even more media attention, bringing out the speculative investors, and causing a snowballing effect.

Than the more ‘reckless’ part of the general population, who didn’t want to miss their only chance to get rich quick, decided to invest without doing proper (or even any) research. This was a recipe for disaster, as we all know by now.

Next Bull Run

Currently investors are wary, mainstream interest is gone, and according to the media Bitcoin is still a worthless bubble. So about the same conditions as last time, right?

Not exactly, these reckless investors have either already lost most of their money, or won’t be ‘fooled’ twice.

This is why in my opinion, the next bull run will most likely be triggered by use cases, mainstream adoption, and in other words actual real-world value. Prices will undoubtedly still be affected by media attention and speculation, but unlike previously, these won’t be the main driving force behind them, at least initially.

Therefore attracting more conservative investors, but there is a catch, these investors won’t risk a significant amount of money straight away. They’ll need to be convinced, and see it with their own eyes (or money).

BAT’s Role

This is where BAT will prove it’s value, to find out why, we need to understand the concept behind BAT:

Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a token for a decentralized ad exchange, it compensates the browser user for his attention (viewing ads) while protecting his privacy. BAT connects advertisers, publishers, and users, while removing social and economic costs associated with existing ad networks, e.g., fraud, privacy violations, and malvertising.

Let’s focus on the compensation aspect for now, because this will be the killer feature driving mainstream adoption. According to Brendan Eich, CEO of Basic Attention Token, users will roughly earn $224/year, for browsing the web and viewing infrequent ads. Not an insignificant amount of money for most people.

These earnings can either be payed out in fiat or cryptocurrency, and will most likely be processed by Coinbase, as mentioned in my previous article. This means that every user who opts in to view BAT ads, will be exposed to other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and possibly even a bunch of ERC-20 tokens.

Now, most of these users will choose to directly cash out their earnings. However, some of them will be willing to risk their essentially ‘free money’ on some cryptocurrency, similar to a free bet or some free spins at a casino. Once these people see their risk-free investment increase in value, they might even be inclined to invest some of their ‘hard-earned money’. There is a reason most online casinos offer these kinds of promotions, because it’s the most effective way to get people to spend ‘their own money’.

Driving Adoption

For all of this to play out, BAT will first need to achieve mainstream adoption, but this won’t happen until their killer feature (BAT ads) is released. According to Luke Mulks, Senior Tech Specialist at Brave, Public ad trails will be introduced mid-summer, so most likely around August. So for now, let’s focus on what happens after this feature is released.

Currently Brave, a web browser app that integrates the BAT platform, is running a referral program, where publishers receive $5 worth of BAT for each user that downloads the brave browser. Over 7,444 creators are currently participating, including massive Youtubers like Philip Defranco (6 million subs) and Bart Baker (10 million Subs).

Combine this, with the $224/year an user can potentially earn by simply switching to a different browser, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for an gigantic explosion in user adoption.

Potential Users

There are entire communities dedicated to earning some extra money online, thousands of Youtube tutorials, hundreds of Facebook groups, and even a very active Reddit page, all dedicated to this topic. Now most of the current methods either take lots of time, or pay such a low amount that you won’t even reach the payout threshold, the thing is people still do them, regardless of the fact that they aren’t worth doing.

This is where BAT can change the game, an essentially passive way of earning a significant amount of side money, and a referral program that gives these ‘gurus’ an incentive to spread the word. Once BAT ads get released to the public, it won’t even take a month before almost everyone within these communities will be using it. These users will then spread the word to their friends and family, because who doesn’t like ‘free money’. The media will likely jump on the Bandwagon as well, with click-bait titles like “This browser will pay you to browse the internet” or “Is this crypto company the Google killer?”. In other words, everybody will be talking about it.

Snowballing Effect

As the awareness of BAT goes up, user adoption grows, more advertising money flows into the system. Meaning the price goes up even faster, giving investors even less incentive to sell, further reducing the actual circulating supply. Causing the price of BAT to quickly get out of control, bringing out the speculative investors, and creating a snowballing effect.

This is beginning to sound a lot like the previous bull run, right? Well yes, but there’s one ‘minor’ difference, it won’t solely be based on speculation, because there will be real demand and money being spend by advertisers.

This won’t only be good for BAT, but for the entire cryptocurrency maket. Since the money won’t be going to big corporations or unicorn startups, almost all of it will be flowing directly to the users, and therefore as mentioned previously a lot of it will be invested back in the cryptocurrency market.

Sustainable Bull Run

This will cause the entire market to quickly rise past it’s previous highs, while putting cryptocurrencies back into the media spotlight, and grabbing the attention of fresh investors. Almost exactly repeating the scenario of the previous bull run, but with one small difference, a constant stream of advertiser money being distributed to users, who will hopefully spend most of it on cryptocurrencies.

This will by itself cause an even bigger snowballing effect, because the faster the market rises, the more people are willing to invest their BAT earnings in cryptocurrencies. Convincing even more people to invest ‘their own money’, causing the market to rise even more, and repeating the cycle.

This means that the cycle, and therefore this potential bull run, could be sustained as long as new users keep joining the ecosystem. Even when this cycle is broken, as in no new users join the BAT-ecosystem, the entire market would probably keep growing for a good while, due to the amount of new investors flooding the market everyday.

Disclaimer: This article is my opinion and is for information purposes only, it is not intended as investment advice. Seek a licensed professional for investment advice.

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How BAT Could Enable An Even Bigger Cryptocurrency Bull Run was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Update: On July 13 Coinbase officially announced that they are exploring the addition of several new assets including: Basic Attention Token, Cardano, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x. According to the announcement the BAT and ZRX assets will be the first specific ERC20-based assets explored for addition to the platform.

On March 26, Coinbase, the popular cryptocurrency exchange and wallet service, announced that they will add support for Ethereum ERC-20 tokens. While no specific tokens have been been publicly announced, it’s very clear that Coinbase intends to add ERC-20 tokens at some point in the near future. This leaves investors speculating on which token(s) will be added to the platform, I strongly believe this will be Basic Attention Token (BAT), because of the reasons laid out below:

1. Coinbase will only add Apple verified virtual currencies

During the end of 2017, Coinbase became one of the most popular gateways for new cryptocurrency investors. In fact, the Coinbase app was at one point the #1 app on the Apple iOS app store. Being listed on the App Store gives Coinbase a huge advantage over it’s competitors, by keeping the barrier of entry as low as possible, it doesn’t get any easier than installing an app on your phone.

The thing is Apple has rules about which virtual currencies (cryptocurrencies) can be sold or accepted on the iOS store:

“If your app enables people to purchase goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry. Apps may facilitate transmission of approved virtual currencies (e.g. Bitcoin, DogeCoin) provided that they do so in compliance with all state and federal laws for the territories in which the app functions.”

This means Coinbase will only add Apple verified virtual currencies to their platform.

Currently only a few cryptocurrencies are officially listed in the terms & conditions (e.g., Bitcoin), but according to ios-blog.com, the current list of approved currencies are: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Dao, Dash, Digicash, Americoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, LiteCoin, Lisk, Monero, Ripple, Steam, Tether, Waves and ZCash.

Last month Brendan Eich (CEO of BAT/Brave) gave a talk in London and announced that Basic Attention Token (BAT) is the first, and currently the only, ERC20 token to be accepted on the app store.

This means, unless any other ERC-20 tokens get verified, that BAT is currently the only viable option for Coinbase.

2. BAT is a perfect fit for Coinbase

Coinbase recently acquired Earn.com, an app that lets users earn cryptocurrency for answering emails and completing tasks. After this Brian Armstrong made multiple tweets, essentially saying that most “people will get their first crypto by earning it, not buying it.”

Brian Armstrong on Twitter

3/ Those people will get their first crypto by earning it, not buying it. Completing a task, or finding a job (employment!) in the gig economy, will be a major gateway for people to obtain their first bit of cryptocurrency.

This and the acquisition of Earn.com give us an insight into their long term plans, Coinbase is preparing for a major spike in mainstream adoption, which according to them will be enabled by earning cryptocurrency.

The official Coinbase Twitter further confirmed this by announcing their next phase, the utility phase. Which will bring real use cases that enable people to use, earn and transact with products like Earn.com, Toshi and Coinbase Commerce. Pay close attention to the phrasing of this sentence, they are saying “products like”, implying something similar but different. This could just be me over-analyzing their tweets, but considering the context and fact that these announcements are carefully written and checked by multiple employees, which do you think is more likely?

Coinbase on Twitter

The next phase brings real use cases that enable people to use, earn and transact with products like @CommerceCB, @toshi and @earndotcom. We call this the utility phase.

BAT does exactly this, it gives users to ability to earn cryptocurrency by simply browsing the web and viewing ads, like Earn.com it lets users complete a simple task (passively watching ads) and then rewards them (with BAT) for completing it.

CNBC also reported that, Coinbase is preparing for a monster increase in trading, the company doubled the size of its full-time engineering staff and has overhauled much of the the platform’s code to gear up for more activity. Further confirming the suspicion that Coinbase is preparing for a major increase in users and activity.

3. Coinbase employees tweeting about/in reference to BAT

Brian Amstrong, Coinbase founder/CEO, has tweeted about BAT multiple times. Most notably, he replied to his own tweet about the BAT-project, saying: “exactly the sort of token we’d like to support on Coinbase.”

Brian Armstrong on Twitter

@BrendanEich exactly the sort of token we'd like to support on Coinbase and GDAX over the coming year, make it easy to buy/sell these with gov currencies

Brian indirectly tweeted about the Brave browser, which has a similar service to Youtube Red and will have a native Ethereum-wallet, last month.

Brian Armstrong on Twitter

Would be great to see a paid option for Google Search and Facebook products. Have been paying for YouTube Red for a while and it's great. A native wallet in the browser could help. https://t.co/vGmKrgPwcn

Brian tweets in favor of creating utility and helping others, implying coins like BAT align with their vision.

Brian Armstrong on Twitter

100% agree - worth reading this whole thread. I've been feeling this over the past months and years, but struggled to articulate it as cleanly as this. Too many are focused on getting rich quick, not enough on creating utility (helping others). https://t.co/zv7qiDaqzx

Dan Romero, Vice President and General Manager of Coinbase Consumer, has tweeted about BAT in 2016.

Dan Romero on Twitter

5/ I think a lot of consumer entrepreneurs are quietly tracking Brave/BAT and some Kik/KIN. If those work, there will be dozens more.

4. Previous partnership and ties with Coinbase

The team has previously partnered with Coinbase in 2016, to provide Bitcoin wallets and purchasing tools for the Brave Ledger, a Bitcoin-based micro-payments system which automatically and anonymously pays the users favorite websites. This feature has currently been replaced by BAT payments a decentralized version of the system, which essentially does the same thing.

To assume that a similar partnership, involving BAT, is quietly being worked on by both companies, wouldn’t be a big stretch.

Ankur Nandwani, Product Manager of Coinbase, is a adviser of Brave.

The Coinbase and Brave HQs are located within 15 minutes of each other, this might not seem like a big deal, but physical proximity plays a huge part in deciding potential partnerships.

5. BAT is classified as a property with utility, not a security

Coinbase is has not yet registered as a licensed brokerage firm and electronic-trading venue, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Registering with the SEC would let Coinbase expand the cryptocurrencies traded on its platform to include those coins that the SEC identifies as securities, which they currently can’t.

This means, since Coinbase wants to stay fully compliant with the SEC, they can currently only list currencies or tokens that without any doubt aren’t securities.

According to the BAT FAQ, the team and their counsel at Perkins-Coie are confident that the Basic Attention Token is properly classified as property with utility on the platform they are building, and not a security.

Disclaimer: This article is my opinion and is for information purposes only, it is not intended as investment advice. Seek a licensed professional for investment advice.

Get notified of my new articles by following me on Medium and Twitter:

PolarChain (@PolarChain) | Twitter