It is safe to say I would not want to be on the BRAVE Browser Team. While each month they typically have some bugs and issues with payouts this month has been a complete disaster for them. While I have stated the issues I have had with this month's payout the Brave Community page is currently flooded with tons and tons of payment issues. Looking at them it seems most people are having the issue I am though my cutback seems even more than others. Publishers' payouts also appear delayed as typically the payouts are being payout at this point and looking at the Megathread for that it is currently listed as processing soon. Which is new as those payments are normally pretty quick due to there being fewer publishers than regular users.
For me, as it stands the amount of BAT I received was just subtracted from the total amount, I was owed. This would make some sense normally however at the end of August I was owed 17 BAT and some change. I received 5.52 and now my dashboard states I am owed an estimate 12.160 BAT which is something you cannot earn in 8 days with the ad rewards being reset to 0.01 BAT per ad. Somehow the system stated that for 31 days I earned only 5.52 BAT but for this month I have already doubled that amount to 12.160. I have already reached out to them about this issue due to the bizarre nature of it.
I have really tried to wrack my brain about what has happened and what may be going on behind the scenes. My leading ideas are as follows
- The price of gas to send the token has made the distribution of BAT an issue. Up until July BAT had been free to send between your Uphold wallet and another like Coinbase. In July this was changed to it costing 1 BAT to send to Coinbase.
- The Brave Team cannot figure out the price of the token when issued. Due to the way that tokens are issued over some days the team struggles with at what value to issue the token. Since they do not tell us what price it was issued at I feel it's safe to assume it is a sliding scale so some people just get more than others due to the timing of when they get them.
- The referrals are starting to really cut into them. In Western European and the United States, the amount of BAT you earn for a confirmed referral is $7.50. If the Brave team is facing decreasing ad revenue the referral amount is taking up much more of the ad contract money than they would have anticipated. Not wanting to sacrifice the growth of the browser via this system they are sacrificing revenue to distribute to the rest of the rewards users.
- DeFi could be another issue. If users are locking up this token and it's not flowing as they thought it would this could be causing some issue in their underlying idea of how the token would function. If people are staking more and more BAT and not using it for the TAP Network where you trade in BAT for gift cards they may not be getting the burn rate they had hoped for and so much more BAT is circulating than they had initially planned on.
How these issues are to be solved I really have no idea. Since the Brave team operating in secrecy with some critical things, yes they tell us a lot but there is still a constant issue with distributions because the value of the ads does not make sense, it is ripe for crazy theories. Until they give the users some idea of how much they take in and how much they distribute beside what they told us, they pay out 70% of what they take in, we users are really unable to tell if they are keeping their word or not. This has been a continuous cause of concern and friction between the developers and the people who use the browser and there is not much else to be done than for the Brave team to "open up their books" to satisfy their users. Hopefully, something is done sooner rather than later to help users better understand what they are earning and the dashboard will better indicate how much is being earned.
Brave really prides itself on the idea of BAT tokens so this is a critical thing for them to fix. While even without the rewards the browser is far superior to most others out there. Though more importantly for the future going forward the distribution of BAT puts the browser squarely in the crypto space which is rapidly growing and is going to be part of the future moving forward.
