Technical Operations Coordinator at Brave, Chris Nguyen, hosted a Reddit AMA in which he answered questions from the community.

Although he stated that he was happy to discuss all topics, including details of his personal life, the most upvoted questions were about the future direction of Brave.

For example, one user asked Nguyen to explain THEMIS in simple terms. Nguyen responded by saying THEMIS is a proposal to decentralize Brave. But it’s still at the research stage of development, and so won’t be coming anytime soon.

“THEMIS is a way of moving the ad system on-chain in order to decentralize it. Part of THEMIS involved a discussion of side-chains, and staking was introduced in that context.”

Similarly, another user asked about the prospects of Brave being a commercial success. In response, Nguyen said the concept of a privacy-based browser strikes a chord with the dominant spirit of these times. As such, everything is aligned for Brave to succeed.

Brave Browser Stats Show Steady Growth

Analysis of metrics, such as publishers onboarded and the number of BAT addresses, all show consistent growth.

What’s more, this pattern repeats with the leading metric – the number of active users. The latest information shows that the number of active monthly users hit 15.4 million in May 2020, which is up 50% over the previous seven months.

“Brave saw its monthly active users pass the 15 million mark with 15.4 million users, a growth of 50% since the Brave 1.0 launch this past November, and of 125% or 2.25x over the past year. Daily active users also went up significantly, with 5.3 million users browsing with Brave on a daily basis, up from 2 million one year ago.”

Active monthly users on Brave for the 8 months to May 2020. (Source: brave.com)

Internet Users Are Wising Up

Taking these stats into consideration, it hard to argue against Nguyen’s points. At face value, it seems as though internet users increasingly see privacy as important.

What’s more, as Nguyen points out, this attitudinal shift is a relatively recent phenomenon. He refers to a growing realization that the internet is not private, and how, in response, users are fighting to reclaim their privacy. This is especially so within the context of growing distrust of governments and oligarchical private companies.

“Privacy is the new hot topic. Regular people are starting to care about privacy (see the Social Dilemma movie, for example), and governments are too. The social, political and regulatory environment looks great for BAT and Brave. Indeed, not even 10 years ago, caring about privacy was only for those who wore tinfoil hats, and would occasionally get you laughed at at family BBQs!”

With that, Nguyen believes that Brave is poised to reap the benefits of this “awakening”. For that reason, he feels both Brave and BAT have a bright future ahead.

The price of BAT today is up just under 1% to $0.2393. The last seven days have seen BAT rally 5% from a four-month low of $0.2121.

BAT daily chart YTD with volume. (Source: tradingview.com)