Hi Everyone!
We’re excited to announce a significant update to the Brave Rewards wallet.
Starting 07/24/2019, users who browse with Brave’s Nightly build will be able to withdraw BAT from the Brave Rewards wallet after verifying and creating an account with our partner Uphold! Users will also be able to buy additional BAT, should they want to contribute more than they earn through opting into Brave Ads.
Here are some important details regarding this update:
If you wish to earn BAT by enabling Brave Ads and send those BAT to publishers via auto-contribute and tipping, that will remain as-is. What is changing is that you will need to verify with Uphold if you wish to add funds to your wallet from another external source — such as a credit card, bank account, or another crypto wallet.
Why do we require that you verify your Uphold account in order to gain control over your wallet?
While Brave isn’t a bank, our partner Uphold is the custodian of verified wallets and can make connections to banks, allowing funds to travel into and out of the wallets. As part of our commitment to maintaining your privacy, Brave does not process or store the data that you provide to Uphold when you sign up. That is managed by Uphold and is a critical step necessary to allow this flow from your browser wallet to an external account.
For users who have already gone through this process with Uphold (like our Verified Publishers), the process is even easier. When prompted, you’ll just need to log into Uphold.
This is a new feature we are excited to have you try. We would appreciate it if you could keep the feedback focused here.
As with any new feature, we expect some issues to be reported. At release, we will flag a couple of items so that we can give you a general timeline as to when they will be remediated. — each of these issues will be resolved before the feature is in full release (that is, by the time the feature progresses from the nightly channel, to dev, to beta, and finally to the release channel)
Issue 1 (Privacy) - Temporarily, your wallet address and Uphold user name will be visible to content creators you tip. This will be fixed well before general release. We expect a fix in early August.
Issue 2 (Verified channels) - For launch, only Creators with one channel will be verified. This is a temporary stopgap while we work with Uphold to address linkability concerns for Publishers with multiple channels, the ETA on which is early August.
Issue 3 - Direct tips will not be reflected in the Creator dashboard statement for a small period of time. For now the best place to see these tips is on the Uphold site. We expect a fix in early August.
Issue 4 (Self tipping via user wallets) - For this release, Brave users who use the same credentials for their user wallets as Creators may not be able to self tip. We are working on fixing this feature.
Issue 5 (Existing Ad Rewards) - if a Brave user has Ads rewards already claimed, they will not be automatically deposited to their user wallets for the first release. Also, the Ads settlement in August for nightly and developer channel users will not be deposited directly to user wallets. However, all Ads rewards will be deposited directly to user wallets starting September.
Other noteworthy changes for Creators when 0.69 goes to release
- Creators will now have to be verified with Uphold to get tipped any BAT
- Unverified creators will not be able to participate in auto-contribute due to the unverified status as well
How can I try this feature?
At the time of this post, you will be able to find it in the Nightly build here : https://brave.com/download-nightly/
The feature is also available in our Developer build here : https://brave.com/download-dev/
This has been a widely requested feature and is a major milestone in the development of the BAT ecosystem.
We’re looking forward to receiving your feedback!