June 2021 BAT Purchases Analysis
On July 1, 2021, Brave released the numbers about BAT purchases over the course of the month on the Transparency Data Feed page. What we have looks like this:
| Date | Tokens | Source |
| 2021-06-26 | 400,000 | Coinbase |
| 2021-06-25 | 300,000 | Coinbase |
| 2021-06-24 | 400,000 | Coinbase |
It seems like Brave is now solely using Coinbase for its token buys. Is this a broader message about the relationship with Uphold? That remains to be seen.
For a reminder, here is what the data looked like for May 2021:
| Date | Tokens | Source |
| 2021-05-19 | 122,175 | Coinbase |
| 2021-05-19 | 200,000 | Coinbase |
| 2021-05-19 | 200,000 | Coinbase |
| 2021-05-17 | 65,984 | Coinbase |
| 2021-05-16 | 190,618 | Coinbase |
| 2021-05-12 | 200,000 | Coinbase |
| 2021-05-12 | 200,000 | Coinbase |
As we can see, June BAT purchases come out to 1,100,000 vs. May BAT purchases of 1,178,777. This is a decrease of -78,777 BAT month-over-month. This is the first time the amount of BAT bought has decrease since I’ve been reporting on this. It’s not down by a whole lot, but I think we can probably look to crypto not being as hot as it was at the beginning of the year. But let’s take a look at the ecosystem.
Month-Over-Month Analysis
At the beginning of June, BAT was trading at $0.74, reaching a high of $0.85 before a general market adjustment started trending downward, eventually ending the month at $0.58. This is quite a downturn, certainly, but is it cause for alarm? No, I doubt it.
But what does that mean for the real-world growth of the BAT ecosystem itself? Well, based on transparency figures, we can get a pretty solid idea. Using the mid-day ranges of the purchases performed by Brave, we can see:
| Date | Tokens | Unit Price | Dollar Value |
| 2021-06-26 | 400,000 | $0.50 | $200,000.00 |
| 2021-06-25 | 200,000 | $0.52 | $104,000.00 |
| 2021-06-24 | 400,000 | $0.57 | $228,000.00 |
According to the numbers, Brave made tokens purchases of $1,271,160.42 in May and $532,000.00 in May. That means that ad spend decreased of $-739,160.42 month-over-month. This is a 58% decrease. This is certainly disappointing for those of us who want Brave to succeed, but I don’t think this is a major deal unless it becomes a trend. Nothing grows positively forever.
BAT Distribution Thoughts
At the beginning of June 2021, Brave announced that they had 33.8 million monthly active users (MAUs). As a thought exercise, if you were take the monthly average users total at 33.8 million and you evenly divide by the number of BAT purchased just by Brave directly each of the last two months, you will find that in April, those users would have received 0.039 BAT (1,178,777 / 30,000,000) in May vs. receiving 0.026 BAT (1,000,000 / 38,800,000) in June. In other words, the payout should decrease for everyone, just because there were fewer BAT purchased during the month.
As always, this exercise assumes that all MAUs are signed up for Brave Rewards and that Brave divided the BAT purchased on behalf of advertisers was split evenly. This is not meant to be a literal 1:1 analysis.
Conclusion
The biggest story coming out of May is the downturn, of course. Fewer ads were purchased this month, but it could also be that June is simply not a big ad-buying month. That remains to be seen.
However, Brave is still courting advertisements with entries from older advertisers and new ones alike. If you are interested in seeing more, you can view a list of currently running ads in your region by going to this site.
Despite the doldrums, we are still early to the party, I belive. However, as always, DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH and never put in what you are not willing to lose!
