First-order effects

• Users on all four platforms get tracker-free browsing out of the box, while publishers and ad networks lose tracking-based revenue from every Brave user without any opt-in required.
• Eich's Mozilla pedigree makes this a direct competitive shot at the browser establishment he helped build, framed around privacy as the default rather than a setting.

Second-order effects

• Blocking ads by default creates a monetization vacuum Brave itself must fill — the company's answer, a Bitcoin-based Payments system that privately rewards websites users actually visit, turns the blocker into a new payment rail between readers and publishers.
• Incumbent browsers face pressure to treat privacy as a product feature rather than a compliance checkbox, since a funded open-source rival is now marketing its absence of tracking as the headline.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, browsers consolidate into platforms with their own economics — Brave's trajectory runs through a $35M token sale and a version 1.0 launch across all major platforms (officially shipped in 2019) toward owning both the client and the payment layer, and later even search via its Cliqz-derived engine.
• The structural shift is from browsers as neutral windows onto the ad-funded web to browsers as arbiters of what loads, what gets paid, and who sees the user — a governance role regulators and publishers will eventually have to engage with.