Unfortunately customer service at Gemini is not that good. The average person working for them does not understand the things going on. I’ve contacted them before about issues for them to say it was Brave’s issue. Yet when I insisted and asked them to escalate it to someone higher, the supervisors then acknowledged it was their own issue.
That said, the reason is that Gemini generally just focuses on generic info. So if they are offering services to a region themselves, they’ll say they noticed no changes and to check with Brave. Yet if it’s because paperwork between them and Brave and they put a pause only on Brave, not all of their customer support people are aware.
Brave has shared things. It looks like I didn’t directly link it here, but you might want to check out Psa: updates from brave call
In that is a link to a YouTube where a Community Call was held. At 42 minutes, I started talking to Luke Mulks and others where they talked about this topic. I’ll quote below their answers. It was primarily about India but they were saying it in regards to all regional changes.
We’ve moved fast in trying to get BAT to everyone and make ourselves available in as many regions as possible. Unfortunately each government has different restrictions and we’ve encountered some pushback from that in different countries. For example, each country has different requirements for KYC/AML among other things that weren’t being met by current standards, so those regions had to be put on hold while this gets resolved.
We really want India and other countries to be able to be Verified and are working behind the scenes to do everything we need. We hope to get this resolved ASAP but there’s no timeline.
What this means is there are obligations needed by various countries. Brave was not able to comply with everything as needed. Therefore, while they get things together, there was a hold placed between Brave and Gemini. Neither company is wanting to give details or say which screwed up, though it’s looking more like Brave. Yet even if Brave messed up, it would be Gemini who stepped in and said changes needed to be made if they wanted to stay in business together.
However, not everything is all about Brave for some countries. Like Russia, Ukraine, and Venezuela not being able to connect is due to government regulations and sanctions. It’s absolutely nothing to do with Brave.
India, Vietnam, India, and a couple others are because of fraudulent activity overall. There were some issues regarding legal compliance and all as well, but there’s a lot of stolen accounts and things going on as well. For example, a User posted here to show some of the things they were finding of people selling accounts (which means selling other people’s identities) so people could retrieve BAT. Some Fraudsters Buying and selling Gemini and Uphold accounts for BAT token withdrawal
Because there are so many little things impacting each region, it’s hard to give a full answer. So what generally is being passed on is that each thing is temporary and asking people to be patient.
ALSO
There are changes coming up that I can’t wait to figure out. For example:
The process in having a business relationship with exchanges is more difficult than Users may realize. There are a lot of fees and other arrangements that need to be set up to happen.
That said, we are in talks with multiple and hoping to reach new deals to expand offerings. In fact, we can’t give details, but we have a major deal we’re hoping to reach soon that would make Users very happy. We are also always reaching out and trying to do business with other companies, but it takes time.
And whether related or not, there’s a recent response to me in regards to Backup & Restore for Rewards, so that Unverified users won’t risk losing their BAT if something happens to their device. Of course, when I say Unverified, it also means Users who can no longer connect to Gemini or Uphold. Their information on that is:
As you can see in the PR brave/brave-core#13757, a tremendous amount of work went into this, and the feature has been going through the code review process. However, some big changes will be coming to Brave Rewards in the near future that may make Backup & Restore less relevant. As a result, we decided in a meeting last week (after considerable deliberation) that Backup & Restore be put on pause.
In the meantime, users facing a situation in which they have no custodial option and need to back up their current vBAT can manually copy-paste/back up their /brave-browser folder (at least on desktop), which will contain their vBAT at the time of manual backup. They can find a path to it in brave://version.
They won’t reveal these big changes. Anyone here can make any assumptions, such as wondering if those changes might make a difference for current Unsupported Regions, but since they won’t reveal details, we don’t know and only have to wait.
idk why… no payouts for april and may,so bad 