How Brave Is Taking on Google By Leveraging Privacy in Web3

Back in 2016, when Brave was just getting off the ground, few people were talking seriously about online privacy. In fact, most people weren’t even sure anyone cared. But nearly a decade later, Brave is now used by more than 100 million monthly active users — and the conversation around privacy has gone from niche to necessary.

“We're at a spot where it's obvious people care,” Brave’s VP of Business Operations Luke Mulks told Coinage. “What really matters now is like, we've got to have folks that are really strong on first principles... What does privacy actually mean for a user?”

As Mulks explains, Brave's answer to that has always been clear: put users first. Whether it’s through a browser that blocks tracking, a crypto wallet built into the browser, or its Basic Attention Token (BAT) that allows users to earn while browsing, Brave’s mission has never been about reinventing the wheel — just improving it.

And as big tech companies doubles down on AI and advertisers fight to capture attention, Brave is betting that users will value privacy-first tools more than ever.

“If you're not updating as you go and learning from the changes, you get stuck in the old ways,” Mulks said. “We're growing the way we are, not by compromising on privacy — we're actually more strong on it than we ever have been.”

Brave’s BAT token — co-authored by Mulks in its original white paper — was launched in 2017 to experiment with monetizing attention differently. Instead of treating users like data points to be mined and sold, Brave’s model lets users earn BAT for viewing ads and share in the attention economy themselves.

“You get a better experience because you have better privacy,” Mulks explained. “You actually get user-first attention economies where you should be able to earn with your attention and not be left out of the loop of what's scaled and proliferated as this huge business model that powers the web.”

It’s a vision that contrasts sharply with the surveillance-based models of companies like Google, and it’s one that Brave is doubling down on in 2026. As Mulks teased, Brave is working on upgrades to further tie together users’ crypto wallets with everyday transactions — enabling users to earn not just from attention, but from spending.

“Ultimately, we should be treating crypto like an account type,” he said, noting payments in crypto should be as seamless as they are with credit cards. Brave is also developing tools to help creators earn more reliably amid the rise of AI and traffic fragmentation, with “some things on that front too that are kind of AI related around content creation” coming soon.

Coinage is experimenting with leveraging Brave's BAT token this year in our Crypto Project of the Year series, where holders can vote to advance crypto projects before one project is crowned champion.

But Brave’s ambitions don’t stop with creators. Mulks believes the next phase of crypto adoption will come from building products that everyday users — not just traders or techies — actually want to use. “The next 10 to 20 million crypto users are actually already in the product,” he said. “We just haven’t met them with something that is interesting for them yet.”

That user-first mentality extends to Brave’s approach to AI, where the company is actively developing “agentic” browsing tools while staying grounded in security. “You’ve got [Perplexity's] Comet and [ChatGPT's] Atlas and a lot of these AI-driven browsers,” he said. “We want to do agentic things in Brave too — but it’s got to stay in our secure, user-first ethos.”

Brave’s research has already uncovered vulnerabilities in some agentic systems, like injection attacks where hidden elements on a page could manipulate AI behavior. “It creates a whole other hornet's nest of potential issues,” Mulks warned. “But once you identify those things... let’s just position ourselves with agentics in another way.”

Looking ahead to 2026, Mulks offered both optimism and caution. “Your bank account might be using crypto faster than you think,” he predicted. But he also flagged growing concerns around copy trading and behavioral data being used in unforeseen ways: “You're really... compromising on privacy in ways that people don't necessarily anticipate.”

The solution, Mulks insists, isn’t doom, but discipline and staying true to first principles even as new tech emerges.

“The stuff that goes wrong is driven by policy choices and decisions before the code's written,” he said. “That’s why this stuff really matters.”

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