It’s not often that you hear of crypto founders standing up for one another, especially after a year marked by infighting and hash wars. So when one CEO sticks up for another, it proves that there are builders out there who are not only out for themselves.
Zcash Founder Zooko Wilcox recently came to the defense of the Brave team after the ecosystem, including the decentralized browser, Basic Attention Token (BAT) and co-founder Brendan Eich, came under fire on social media.
Even though Wilcox is an advisor to the Brave team, his support is a sign that some projects want to see their peers succeed rather than beaten to a proverbial pulp.
But that’s not to say that a few online punches weren’t thrown in the community. It started with Tom Scott, a British YouTuber with more than 1 million subscribers. Scott is a YouTuber who attracted BAT donations worth $33. The problem is, he never asked for them. Instead, he said, Brave did so on his behalf, pointing to the following image –
Source: Twitter
This is a feature of the Brave incentive system, which collects tips on behalf of content creators but does not notify them until those tips total $100.
Scott complained on Twitter that Brave had “been taking cryptocurrency donations ‘for me,’ using my name and photo, without my consent.” After requesting refunds for those who donated, he wasn’t satisfied with Brave’s mealy-mouthed response. The YouTube sensation went on to characterize the funds raised as “pseudo money” and even suggested that Brave violates GDPR, the European data privacy regulation, in doing so.
Brave’s Friends And Frenemies
At first glance, the response from the crypto community appears mixed. Jackson Palmer, creator of Dogecoin, took Scott’s side, saying that the feature was “creepy and misleading.” It may also be a sign of the nascent nature of the blockchain space, in which projects continue to hold hackathons to spot vulnerabilities and issues.
Zcash’s Wilcox, on the other hand, was quick to defend the Brave team, saying in a tweet: “The Brave team are pros, and they’re fighting for the side of good. I’m proud to serve as an advisor to them,” linking to a 2017 announcement in which he revealed the relationship.
Brave’s Eich offered a swift rebuttal to the complaint and was rather cool about it, agreeing to improve some of the features of the Brave Rewards system, with more tweaks to come in the New Year. The last thing any crypto founder wants right now is to be accused of violating privacy rules like GDPR, especially with regulators circling like lions their prey.
Brave is also overhauling its tipping structure and so Brave users shouldn’t be surprised to see a “DoNotTip” message associated with the accounts of content creators who have a beef with BAT. According to the most recent announcement:
Starting tomorrow, Brave Rewards will clearly indicate which publishers and creators have not yet joined Brave Rewards, so users can better control how they donate and tip. This new message will appear in the regular donation process and in the tipping box. Moreover, creators that have not verified with Brave will no longer have their YouTube or Twitch channel images appear within Brave Rewards.
The BAT price has shed approximately three-quarters of its value this year. That Brave Rewards feature -which is expected to allow peer-to-peer tips on social networking sites in the next upgrade- still has a long way to go.
The author is invested in digital assets, including Zcash which is mentioned in this article.
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