Brendan Eich's browser startup, Brave, raises $35M via its initial coin offering, selling out in under 30 seconds
Jonathan Keane / CoinDesk :
Context & Ripple Effects
Brave has been building toward this since Brendan Eich's open-source, tracking-blocking browser launch in early 2016, followed by a $4.5M venture round and a Bitcoin-based Payments system that privately rewards websites users visit. The ICO is the step that turns that payments experiment into a funded token economy — and it does so without another traditional equity round.
First-order effects
- Brave banks $35M in under 30 seconds — roughly eight times its entire prior venture raise — from public token buyers instead of institutional investors, giving Eich's team runway to scale the browser and its reward system.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and users on Brave's Bitcoin Payments rails now have a dedicated token to transact in, shifting the browser from ad-blocker to intermediary that routes money between audiences and sites; rival browser makers watching this will note that Opera later tapped public markets too, raising $115M in its 2018 IPO with crypto buyers Bitmain and IDG among participants.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, browsers stop being free viewers of an ad-funded web and become settlement layers for attention — with the browser vendor, not the ad network, deciding how user attention is priced and paid out.
The trend: Browser startups are funding themselves by tokenizing the attention they intermediate between users and publishers, an arc that carried Brave from a $4.5M seed to a reported $100M annualized revenue business.