Description of the issue:
I noticed that Ramp will tack on a “Brave fee” when you buy via the Brave Wallet page. If you’re depositing a lot, that fee quickly adds up. For example, I was attempting to put in $700 worth of ETH, and Ramp added a $7 dollar “Brave fee”. If I buy directly via the Ramp website, that fee isn’t there.
Can someone explain why this is happening? Seems pretty sketch tbh. $7 dollars is way more than the Network fee. Not to mention this is easily bypassable by just using the official ramp.network buy page, so I am not sure what the point of this is.
The $7 amount is a 1% commission that we add for facilitating the on-ramp through Brave Wallet, and more importantly help support Brave and its free and open-source products.
As you pointed out, you can buy crypto directly from Ramp website without the affiliate fee included. Note that a lot of our on-ramp users are first-time crypto buyers and therefore prone to fat-finger errors. Using Ramp through Brave Wallet certainly reduces this risk.
I will follow-up with the team to make things more transparent in future.
Hi @onyb thanks for the official clarification. I’d like to have an honest discussion about this fee though, as it strikes me as a bit sneaky if not unfair for numerous reasons.
If this is commission, why is it being passed on to the customers? Ramp should be paying Brave for driving customers to their service for on-ramping. There’s no financial incentive here for users to want to pay the commission when they’re not really getting anything back, whereas Ramp has a lot of incentive to get Brave users to constantly use their service.
The commission absolutely DWARFS the network fees. As you can see in the screenshot, the ETH network fee was $0.54, while the Brave fee is $7.04. That’s a whopping 13x difference. What is the point of Brave partnering with Solana and Ramp to lower fees, only to then charge a comparatively exorbitant amount in commission. This only drives people away from using the Brave wallet.
Large fees on large buys discourages users from using the Brave Wallet buy UI, thereby making them risk fat-finger errors on large sums of money. If I am getting charged $7 bucks to buy $700 ETH, I will not buy via the Brave UI. That means I’ll be risking fat-finger errors when I buy through the main ramp.network site. However, because this is a large buy, I really should be protected from fat-finger errors. Charging this commission is more likely to put users at risk.
I am not against Brave getting support, but this should be an optional thing inside the Brave wallet. The fact that this fee gets applied on EVERY transaction is a bit much, especially when you’re dealing with large deposits.
If Brave insists on charging a commission to their users, then this should be made VERY clear in the UI. A 1% fee on large buys is no joke, Brave shouldn’t just sneak this in on unsuspecting users, especially since Brave Wallet is targeting new crypto users in general. There should be very clear statements on the Buy widget stating that Brave will collect a commission.
1.) There is nothing wrong with this type of “commission” or whatever the correct word is. A lot of smaller exchanges proxy their own order book to bigger exchanges like binance and coinbase. Meaning, your buy order is not fulfilled by the smaller exchange but by binance. Usually if, binance takes 0.5% cut, the smaller exchange will also take 0.5% cut, adding upto 1%.
On the other hand, if we take amazon in context. They partner with online creators and pay these creators if someone buys stuff using their links (partner program). It is similar to what you are talking about, that Ramp should pay Brave, instead of brave taking fee from their own users.
But, the deal between ramp and brave, ramp and other wallets is of the former way, again nothing wrong/illegal/sketchy about it.
2.) True, but while looking about ramp fees, I read that Ramp is more suitable for smaller buys like 10$. Anything above 500$ fees add up more than buying on CEX and transferring if off to your wallet.
10$+20$ (fee/gas)=30$ whereas on ramp 10$+0.5$(5% fee)=10.5$
500$+20$ (fee/gas)=520$ whereas on ramp 500$+25$ (5% fee)=525$
4.) Nothing wrong about it as it is in the contract, and the fee is clearly* displayed while buying your crypto (*=not exactly right now).
5.) In the UI, I think they can say ‘Brave Wallet Fee’ or ‘Brave Company LLC fee’ something like that. They can post a FAQ of 1% ‘commission’ on https://brave.com/wallet/ in FAQ question in detail. Then link this particular FAQ on the payment page (seen in your photo) on the new title ‘Brave wallet Fee’, with the ‘i’ symbol just the like network fee which links back to Ramp FAQ section or gives detail right then and there.
1.) Glad to know that the commission is comparable to using exchanges, but at the same time Brave isn’t trying to be an exchange. Brave isn’t hosting any online service on our behalf. All they’re doing is linking to Ramp and pre-filling the address. Seems a bit unfair that they’d charge the same amount as an exchange, especially when using ramp.network directly avoids this. Using Brave Wallet should be more competitive fee-wise than using exchanges, not the same.
2.) In my opinion, the comparison shouldn’t be between buying via Brave vs buying via exchange + transfer to private wallet. It should be between buying via Brave vs buying via exchange and keeping it in the exchange wallet. Obviously things start to even out when you start incurring additional gas fees when transferring to a private wallet. However, if you want new customers to prefer using Brave Wallet vs exchange, it needs to be cheaper, not the same, especially when Brave Wallet users need to pay additional gas fees to send it back to an exchange for cashout.
5.) Agreed. A clear disclaimer in the buy UI needs to be present.
But that would be unfair as internal transactions on exchange (keeping it in the exchange wallet) won’t be on-chain while transactions would be on-chain for Brave Wallet.
As compared to using exchanges, this would be difficult to implement on Ethereum especially for large number of transactions (0x swap fee is already high) but easier on Solana. However with regard to fee on Ramp, +1.
I totally get that. I understand the difference between how exchanges handle things in the background vs on-chain, so I am okay with gas fees, but like I said in my original post, the 1% fee Brave charges dwarfs the current gas fees and makes Brave Wallet not competitive.
