Why I Don't Expect The Coronavirus to Affect BAT or Brave

The coronavirus outbreak has shaken the global economy. Almost half of the world is in lockdown. The stock markets are all going downwards. The cryptocurrency market was also hit hard and lost over 25% of total capital. But some projects have made gains even in this situation. These are primarily pharmaceutical companies and online businesses.

The Basic Attention Token was also hit and went down below 10 cents after which it recovered back to 17 cents. The Brave Browser on the other hand was quite successful in gaining new users. Many users may feel that the market situation is uncertain at the moment. However, I do not see it that way. Let me highlight some updates and show why I don't expect the Coronavirus situation to affect BAT or Brave Browser.

Even though the token price is down, the majority of performance indicators show consistent growth in all aspects of the browser. The brave browser added over 1 million users in March 2020. Des Martin, Head of Brave's Marketing Department revealed the stat on his twitter timeline:

At the time of writing, the number of verified creators who joined Brave in the last 30 days was 67,639 creators, a 14% increase. Brave sent 12 million tokens worth about 2 million US dollars to uphold wallet.

Brave's director of Business Development, Luke Mulks said the money was meant for referral payments. This correlates with the growth statistics mentioned by the marketing head, Des Martin. Brave now has 13.5 million monthly active users and 4.3 million daily active users.

But Brave's most significant achievement in recent days isn't the growth of the platform. It is the newly released Android version that is built from scratch. The release announcement says:

"This new version is a seamless transition for Brave users as the user interface remains the same, but it does provide performance enhancements such as battery savings (5%), as well as CPU and data savings (3%), compared to the previous version (1.5.9).

These savings are additional to the savings that Brave already realized when compared with major browser vendors (30%-50% bandwidth and battery reduction compared to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera)." - Brave.com - Rebuilt Brave Android

You might wonder, why is this a big deal? Even bigger than 1 million+ users? The answer to that is, quality. This update will noticeably improve the user experience of Brave users. If the brave team works hard to ship a high quality product, gaining more users by marketing it would be a much easier task.

The internet browser market is huge. The United States alone has around 128 million android users. Brave's growth potential will increase dramatically if its services are better / superior to its competitors (Chrome, Firefox).

If you don't have it yet, you should definitely give it a try by downloading it from here. Who doesn't love 5% savings in battery life? I assume most of you who are reading this blog either use brave or chrome. I used to use chrome too! before switching to brave.

Now chrome is my secondary browser on my android smartphone. The core code of Brave is open source and hosted on Github. You can post an issue there if you face any bugs / problems.

So, my conclusion is that COVID-19 has zero impact on Brave. The lockdown has actually increased web browsing activity which is good for a browser software like Brave.