Brave's ad blocking and advertising are separate things - the adblocker is basically pretty much like uBO, but written in Rust and integrated as part of the browser.
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
> 3. Brave happily collected those tokens on behalf of creators who didn't want to be a part of the scheme (e.g. Tom Scott). They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
As far as I know, this was a Brave-held extra pool of BAT they had to kickstart the whole tipping system. If a creator wasn't onboard, they held the BAT for 90 days and if the creator hadn't signed up by then, returned it to the pool to be directed by the users again. I don't know if it happened to the users' own BAT, but in any case Brave didn't hold onto the coins.
The original UI back when the whole thing happened was pretty bad at distinguishing whether a creator was or wasn't a part of the program, if old screenshots are anything to go by. They fixed the UI to be clearer.
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
> 3. Brave happily collected those tokens on behalf of creators who didn't want to be a part of the scheme (e.g. Tom Scott). They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
As far as I know, this was a Brave-held extra pool of BAT they had to kickstart the whole tipping system. If a creator wasn't onboard, they held the BAT for 90 days and if the creator hadn't signed up by then, returned it to the pool to be directed by the users again. I don't know if it happened to the users' own BAT, but in any case Brave didn't hold onto the coins.
The original UI back when the whole thing happened was pretty bad at distinguishing whether a creator was or wasn't a part of the program, if old screenshots are anything to go by. They fixed the UI to be clearer.