Brave develops new features in order to compete with platforms that overlap with web browsing:
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Brave Wallet - cryptocurrency hot wallets w/ recovery seed phrases. wallet applications like Metamask & Phantom start out as extensions and develop towards general web browsing to better accommodate the related mobile UX.
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Brave Talk - Discord, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. Most platforms optimize for fastest, smoothest chat interfaces and embed web content along the way.
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Brave Search/News/Goggles - Bing/Edge, Google, Amazon and Twitter all compete on SEO and concise information retrieval.
While all of these features are worth the competition, there is an underlying adversarial environment with a very low cost of entry: social engineering attacks. Right now, there are a plethora of platforms that rely on manual passwords & only a fraction of them leverage MFA. Brave provides a powerful autofill utility, including password management & key management, but with a convincing enough phishing interface, anyone can compromise their stored passwords & EOAs. I won’t go into detail about the low SNR of social networks, but suffice to say that there is a very low marginal cost to creating misinformation.
Given the impending developments in AI & cryptocurrency, Brave is in an advantageous position to integrate multisigs of social accounts & communications methods for more secure & higher SNR broadcast of personal information, including social content.
With distributed security tooling like Gitcoin Passport, Lit PKPs, & Safe, industrial standards like account abstraction & OAuth, and composable social toolkits like Orbis SDK(orbis. club/documentation), Unirep(developer.unirep. io/docs/welcome), & Farcaster (github. com/farcasterxyz), Brave could offer the following:
- A secure, integrated identity aggregation service like Linktree
- A m/n security threshold for sensitive information in autofill
- A reputable, qualifiable account for RLHF-as-a-service
- MFA for any standard web application from the sum of all methods of communication (including email & SMS)
- Compartmentalized attack surface for onchain authorization (& further MFA utility from hardware wallets)
- An integrated hot wallet that only requires one-shot login & m/n recovery from an arbitrary number of social accounts, instead of a seed phrase.
- More identifiably good actors in day-to-day interactions, compared to the baseline DMs of Twitter or Discord, or current telephone calls.
- A more valuable marketplace for goods, services, and news using an opensource LLM/sorting algorithm that attributes answers to an original, MAA poster
Essentially, as Bing/Edge focuses on Sydney, and other browsers focus on integrating features like multimedia, I think that the biggest edge is legitimacy that can’t be easily forged by AI or a sophisticated sockpuppet cluster. I also think that Brave has already shown interest in integrating features that bring users together from disparate social platforms, as well as features that improve a general mobile UX. Brave Accounts could be much more powerful in this respect.