The Daily Pen #35, Experiments in Brave Rewards Publishers
Unix Epoch: 1566074364
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The Experiment
I've been participating in the Brave Rewards program for a few months now. I collected and held some Basic Attention Token (BAT) over that time. Once I collected about 80 BAT it was time to experiment.
The documentation on BAT and Brave Rewards is quite sparse and scattered across several websites. I found very few answers regarding the methodology of how BAT was awarded per ad viewed or how much BAT could be tipped to an individual registered domain. About the only quantitative value I could find was the fee for transfer from a browser wallet to a Creator wallet. That fee is listed as 5%. So, 5% of all contributions are consumed by the network.
So, I registered one of my domains as a Creator and tipped that domain 35 BAT using multiple transactions:
- Test tip of 5 BAT
- Test tip of 10 BAT
- 2nd tip of 10 BAT
- 3rd tip of 10 BAT
The first tip worked as expected. The tip minus the network fee appeared in my pending Creator account. The second tip completed the transfer correctly, but the complete tip posted in two separate transfers. The third tip posted in same manner as the 2nd. However, the complete value of the third tip seemed to have been greatly discounted.
After tipping 35 BAT, I ended up with a total of 28.74 BAT pending. This seemed quite wrong. I was expecting 35*.95 = 33.25 BAT ... Somehow 4.51 BAT went missing.
I looked through several pages of documentation and couldn't find any information regarding a possible limit on tipping and/or receiving tips. I also couldn't find any information regarding possible extra fees tacked on to large tips from a single network address.
So, I waited until pay day, which is the 8th of every month. On the 8th, 28.74 BAT was deposited. So what happened to the missing BAT...
Well, I continued the experiment and made two more 10 BAT tips. Both tips made it through the transfer minus the 5% network fee. However, after a few days the pending amount increased by the same amount I was missing. So, it appears that contributions are limited 30 BAT per month per incoming contributor address. The rest seems to be held in escrow and added to the next month's contribution from that incoming address.
Math summary
Total tipped: 35 + 20 = 55
Total expected receipts: 55 * 0.95 = 52.25
Total received: 28.74 + 23.51 = 52.25
Apparent Brave Creator tipping behavior
Limit of 30 BAT per month per Browser wallet address per Creator Channel.