April 2021 BAT Purchases Analysis
On April 21, 2021, Brave released some new 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 |
| 2021-04-21 | 486,043 | Coinbase |
First off, we have a new layout for the page. The record links are no longer there and are replaced by a Source column. Interestingly enough, this is the first time that Coinbase is mentioned as the source of the transactions for the month instead of Uphold. Will this be the norm now? Anyone’s guess is as good as another, but it will be interesting to see.
For a reminder, here is what the data looked like for March 2021:
| Date | Tokens | Record link |
| 2021-03-23 | 91,449 | 3fd889ba-62f7-43b3-bab2-14f72920869d |
| 2021-03-23 | 90,508 | 3fe18cf6-ad48-4593-a4d3-c702d7a91ceb |
| 2021-03-23 | 90,405 | 64e24b1f-cee2-4254-86ab-06d788163c7a |
| 2021-03-23 | 90,495 | 576d1d41-5339-40fb-9c2a-84884023c49f |
As we can see, April BAT purchases come out to 486,043 vs. March BAT purchases of 362,857. This is an increase of +123,186 BAT month-over-month.
Month-Over-Month Analysis
On April 21, BAT was trading at $1.30 On March 23, BAT was trading at $1.06. Therefore, the increase in BAT purchases is obviously an increase in advertising dollars coming into the network.
According to the numbers, Brave made tokens purchases of $400,000 in March and $631,855.90 in April (as of the 21st). That means that ad spend increased by almost $232,000 month-over-month. This is a 58% increase. This suggests strengthening momentum for the platform.
BAT Distribution Analysis
At the beginning of April 2021, Brave announced that they had 29 million monthly active users (MAUs). If you were take the monthly average users total at 29 million and you evenly divide by the number of BAT given out each of the last two months, you will find that in March, those users would have received 0.014 BAT (362,857 / 25,000,000) vs. receiving 0.016 BAT (486,043 / 29,000,000) in April. This distribution means that you could potentially see a bigger payout for this month’s ads than last month’s.
Note about recent volatility
After a period of steady increases, the cryptocurrency market corrected and every cryptocurrency has been affected. From April 21, the BAT prices went from $1.30 down to $0.87 and have, at the time of this writing, seemingly stabilized in the $1.10 area. Please keep in mind that market corrections, while potentially scary, are normal. If a cryptocurrency can shoot up spectacularly, it can also fall at the same fantastic fashion. Be alert.
The Elephant In The Room
There has been an issue that the Brave team has had to deal with in regard to ad payout system (the supposed reduction in Brave Rewards payout for users). The Brave team has responded already. It was not intentional.
I did see the issue and thought about making an article about it, but I decided against it. It seemed obvious that what happened was an accident, especially since there was no announcement and it makes no sense that the team would severely restrict BAT earnings without a public announcement.
Brave has shown a willingness to be transparent and the pedigree of the employees seems to be on the up-and-up. I have seen very little that Brave has done so far to not give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to things like this. I would encourage everyone to wait for a company response in the future before flying off the handle. After that, if the response is no good, THEN you can go about pushing for the changes you want.
Conclusion
When Brave makes purchases for May, the lower price of BAT may result in a bigger token purchase and distribution for that month, if MAUs remain the same. This has not been shown as the case so far, as that number seems to grow between 7-8% per month, but we will have to see.
Again, I state that everyone here is still quite early to the party. The amount of money coming in to run ads on the Brave network continues to grow very well and I’ve seen sightings of very big advertisers such as Paramount+ and Jira Software. You can view a list of currently running ads in your region by going to this site.
And all of this is still before the deployment of the Self-Service Dashboard, which is interestingly still MIA even though the tentative schedule launch for stage 2 was 1st Quarter 2021. I still believe that when that launches, we are going to see a surge in token buying.
If you believe in the concept of BAT and are investing, I think this is still a good time to get in. However, as always, DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH and never put in what you are not willing to lose!
