Brave Browser Adds Access to New Crypto Wallets

More wallet features are on their way to the Brave browser.

Support for native cryptocurrency wallets was added to Brave Nightly per a posting yesterday in the official Brave subreddit, r/BATProject. Brave Nightly is a test and development version of the Brave browser.

Brave's three-part marketing system rewards content creators, advertisers, and viewers through its native token, the basic attention token (BAT).

Image via Reddit

The update allows other cryptocurrency wallets to be used with Brave's BAT in new capacities. All users still undergo know your customer (KYC) requirements via Uphold, a wallet Brave partnered with for BAT.

Lack of support for other non-Uphold wallets has been a common complaint on Brave community threads since the token's launch. This bottleneck was self-designed, however. Brave wanted the token's use case, content creation tipping, to take-off. More importantly, perhaps, are the KYC services Uphold provides.

Speaking with CoinDesk, Brave co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich said KYC concerns remain a top priority due to regulatory concerns.

"[Brave] can't let fraud bots with Ledgers or Trezors take us to cleaners, and we have to avoid going to jail if some Office of Foreign Asset listed evildoer were to take out BAT that way," Eich said. "BAT is compliant via Uphold, and I'll defend that decision readily by citing our growth numbers, [both] publishers and users."

Eich said Brave added support for peer-to-peer wallets not to undercut regulators but lead the community forward. Adding wallet support helps adoption while keeping Brave's nose clean, Eich said:

"We have no illusions that raw crypto is not for most users -- it is unusable and way too technical. We do want the users who are able to use it to have integrated crypto wallets in Brave. These users innovate and may collaborate with us, sites and channels, hardware wallet vendors, proxied fullnode services, and even their favorite blockchains at core protocol and implementation levels, to innovate beyond what we alone, or the blockchain projects alone, can do. We like 'lead users' and provide extra options for them"

The wallet update comes days after untargeted ads were added on Brave Nightly for 21 new countries including Argentina, Denmark, Italy, Korea, and Singapore.

UPDATE (16, August 23:00 UTC): An earlier version of this article stated each Uphold transaction required know your customer (KYC) checks and identified the incorrect wallets Brave's update targeted.

Image via CoinDesk archives