Ever since the Brave browser was launched users have been making Basic Attention Token (BAT) price predictions trying to guess where its cryptocurrency is headed. The token was initially sold through an initial coin offering (ICO).
In that ICO, the team behind the Brave browser raised a total of $35 million in under 30 seconds, as investors used their ether to pay hefty fees on the Ethereum blockchain to get their BAT tokens first. To date, those investments have appreciated by about 30%, but they may soon appreciate a lot more, if some price predictions are to be believed.
But first things first.
What Is the Basic Attention Token?
The Basic Attention Token is an ERC-20 token based on the Ethereum blockchain that’s at the heart of a revolutionary online advertising system being implemented by the Brave browser. This new advertising system benefits advertisers, publishers and content creators, and internet users.
It works by distributing advertisement revenue with the users themselves. Essentially advertisers pay to run an ad on the Brave browser or – in the future- on the website of publishers through the Brave Ads program. The money paid for these ads is distributed, with 70% going to users, 15% to content creators, and 15% to Brave.
The Brave Ads program has only rolled out to the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, France, and Germany. So far it seems to be working, however, as 71advertisers ran campaigns on Brave’s desktop version, and saw a 22% click-through-rate. Out of these clicks, 28% of users spent over 10 seconds on the advertiser’s website.
The program is expected to be rolled out to most European countries and to Japan by the end of 2020.
Basic Attention Token Economics
Before we get to the Basic Attention Token price predictions ,we need to look into the cryptocurrency’s economics. In its ICO, Brave sold a total of 1 billion BAT to users, but the cryptocurrency’s supply if 1.5 billion tokens.
Brave kept 200 million tokens for its development team, and has been using an additional 300 million tokens to help attract users to the Brave browser by letting them experiment with the BAT ecosystem.
The total supply will never surpass the 1.5 billion mark. Some users believe that advertisers will keep on buying BAT to run their ad campaign on the Brave browser – and on other browsers in the future – while others believe the tokens users earn will put selling pressure on the crypto, keeping its price from skyrocketing.
Experts’ Basic Attention Token Price Predictions
CryptoGlobe reached out to various cryptocurrency experts to see where they see BAT’s price in the future, and whether they believe it’s a worthwhile investment. Alex Krüger, a trader and economist popular in the cryptocurrency space, was one of the first we reached out to.
Krüger revealed that while he’s familiar with BAT he doesn’t trade it, and as such didn’t have much to offer us. Mati Greenspan, a senior market analyst at eToro, revealed he’s enjoying the Brave browser and believes it has “great potential to shakeup the online advertising industry.”
After looking into the token’s economics he noted it has a very solid model, and added:
Over time, increased use of the network should translate directly into higher valuations for the token.
The senior analyst preferred, however, not to risk a number. Scott Melker, a cryptocurrency trader working at Texas West Capital, pointed us to a tweet hee published where he analyzed BAT’s price performance against bitcoin. Per the trader, technical analysis for the cryptocurrency is currently simple.
$BAT Weekly
Sitting at a key level, 2320. Movement above this line is bullish. pic.twitter.com/i8dSMxODGt
— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) July 17, 2019
He pointed out that if the price closes the week above the blue line the price should appreciate in the near future, while closing below could see BAT retest the resistance seen in the lower blue zone, at around 0.000016 BTC per token.
Community BAT Price Predictions
On a Reddit thread published earlier this year various Basic Attention Token community members made future price predictions for fun. While most users saw BAT’s price stay around the $0.75 to $1 level for 2019, some were more bullish.
One user argue that if Brave Ads takes off like he believes it will, one BAT token could be trading at as much as $10 in the future. When other users showed doubt he revealed in the long run he sees Brave “eating Google,” a company with a $792 billion market cap.
For comparison, BAT’s market cap is of little over $300 million. Another user who agreed with him revealed an AdLedger report showed executives from some leading brands and agencies claimed the “biggest problem in digital advertising” was the “Google/Facebook duopoly.”
Other users were less bullish, with one claiming the year’s high would be of $0.36. CryptoCompare data shows, however, BAT’s yearly high so far was of $0.5035, hit on April 21.
Looking at the Charts
CryptoGlobe’s technical analyst looked at the charts to see if we can take any Basic Attention Token price predictions out of them. Starting off with the monthly USD chart, the analyst pointed out three months ended in the green this year, and were followed by two ending in the red.
Moving to the weekly chart, the $0.19 mark seems to be an important level – currently support – that the chart respects, and which is based on several knots of support and resistance. We see downtrending price and volume (Binance) since April, with the 9 and 21 exponential moving averages (EMAs) about to cross bearish.
Of course, such a bearish cross would be less than ideal. A doji candle closing on last week’s candle could possibly signal a reversal – but the candle itself came on weak volume, and this week will be important for demonstrating some follow-up. A weekly close above $0.29 would probably signal a trend reversal.
Just looking at the weekly BAT/USD indicators, we see a really abysmal collapse in RSI since April. Here, at 45 points, the RSI is risking descending into very bearish territory – although it is not yet there.
The histogram and MACD indicator also look generally grim. But the histogram has started to flatten out on its descent, suggesting a reversal toward the middle line, and an eventual long-term trend reversal.
Finally, on the 3-day BAT/USD chart there appear to be no real sings of medium-term strength, either. Generally falling price is being mirrored by generally falling indicators, suggesting, quite simply, that a solid downtrend still obtains at this timeframe. The histogram troughs are setting new lows which each push.
In this situation, waiting for an obvious bottom may be an option. Based on the 3-day, a revisit of $0.19 seems possible, and doing so with more strength could help signal that a bottom has been found – but there is nothing yet indicating that.
We may briefly contrast this gloomy picture with the BAT/BTC chart. Here, we see the same vicious selloff starting in April 2019 – but also see clear signs of a bottom and recovery.
On the 3-day chart, we get all sorts of bullish divergences, as price gently drifts toward support. We see likely indications that BAT/BTC will reverse trend in the medium term – and depending on what Bitcoin’s price does, BAT could make a rapid recovery – perhaps unpredictably so – on the USD chart as well.
