I think secondary markets could benefit from a distributed trusted database with smart contracts.
I also think that behind the scenes on wall street there are some interesting things around securities settlement, something that is very time consuming and it's handled with some antiquated technology.
If securities trades are settled faster and ownership is more easily verified it could lead to some very interesting shareholder voting behavior.
The problem with all of these is that it requires a deep understanding of the process and the nuances of the industry to build a DLT solution that works.
For any solution for settling trades, the one without the blockchain will be faster. And the use of electronics for trading systems where it makes economic sense is already a done deal.
I'm talking about inter-broker settlements. Like settlements of securities between large banks. The actual physical securities that are stamped and all that.
BAT's quite interesting game-theoretically because they're using the token to set a price on attention. When you view an ad on Brave, it's not a simple transfer of BAT from advertiser to publisher. Rather, some fraction of the BAT goes to the user, and then can be traded on an exchange for other currency.
Because viewing ads is voluntary, and users receive a tradable token in exchange for it, it lets you put a price on attention. The idea is that below a certain price of BAT on the exchange, users won't find it worthwhile to view the ads, and so they won't, which limits the amount of BAT users will sell, eventually forcing an equilibrium. That equilibrium price is the value of the attention that ads cost them. The price then carries over to the amount that buying ads will cost an advertiser, and the amount that publishers receive for them. Basically, they're rectifying an externality by throwing a tradable token at the user: instead of advertising being a transaction simply between advertiser and publisher, it becomes a four-way transaction between advertiser, publisher, user, and Brave itself.
None of this is possible without a dedicated currency, because the currency's other uses would factor into the market price, making it impossible to get a clear signal for how much users value having their attention taken from them.
They needed a way to bootstrap adoption and spread BAT tokens out into the wild. If they didn’t generate them they would have had to pay for something else and they didn’t have the money to do that.
The money raised is being used to build the product and hire talent. It isn't being used to enrich Brendan Eich personally. If you have evidence to the contrary please post it.
