Entering the crypto-currency ecosystem can be overwhelming. There’s a lot of information out there, and you need to read, learn and study how crypto-currencies work in order to make your first investment.
The questions any beginner investor asks are almost always the same: how to buy? who to deposit the money with? what money to buy with? use dollars? at what value to take them? where to deposit the crypto-currencies and where to keep them? The questions are many, and while there are simple answers to all these questions – we’ll answer them in another guide soon – this time we’re going to focus on how to get your first cryptocurrencies without making any investments.
Yes, you read that right: how to earn crypto-currencies without risking your capital?
The option we’re presenting is ideal for those who are just starting out and want to try out how crypto-currencies work, how to use a wallet and even how to make their first crypto-currency transactions.
For some time now, more precisely for around 5 years, there has been a web browser called Brave. Launching for Windows, iOS, Android and Linux in 2019, the browser, created by programmer Brendan Eich, is based on Chromiun – the foundation of Google’s popular Chrome – and is open source. Brave’s special feature, through its Brave Rewards program, is to reward its users with crypto-currencies.
We all know that the “internet”, like traditional media, lives on advertising. Or rather, the sale of advertising. Sites sell advertising space that users, most of the time unknowingly, consume or see. Brave, on the other hand, blocks these ads, making site browsing more pleasant and fluid. But on the other hand, with the user’s consent, it replaces some of these blocked ads with its own. And to enable you to do this, Brave Rewards rewards you with crypto-currencies, specifically a crypto-active token called BAT (Basic Attention Token).
These BAT tokens, which run on the Ethereum blockchain, accumulate day by day in a counter inside the browser and are “cashed out” once a month.
To claim your rewards/cryptocurrencies, you need to link a wallet to the browser, where the BAT accumulated during the month will be deposited. The good news is that Brave is linked to the Uphold wallet, which is fairly easy to use. Simply create a user in the wallet, link it, verify the account, and you’re done.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting your first cryptocurrencies for free.
The first thing to do is download the free Brave browser.
Then we can enter Uphold, create an account – also free – and follow the steps to verify it (there are only a few emails to check that the user is real).
The next step is to link the wallet/wallet/wallet we’ve created in Uphold, with Brave. The procedure is very simple: just click on the Brave icon in the navigation bar and follow the instructions. Next, you’ll need to check it
We then need to enter the Brave Rewards settings (Brave Rewards settings, after clicking on the Brave icon in the navigation bar) to tell the browser that we agree to receive ads in exchange for MTDs. It’s important that, at least for the first few months, we disable the “Automatic contributions” option, so that what we accumulate can be collected in full. Otherwise, part of what we’ve accumulated will be deducted to “pay” – make contributions – to the sites we visit.
On the same Brave Rewards settings screen, you’ll find the date of the first “redemption day”, i.e. the day on which rewards earned throughout the month will be deposited into your Uphold account. MTDs are generally credited to Uphold one day after this date.
The rewards Brave pays out for browsing, i.e. use for at least 30 days in a row, generally range from 1 to 3 MTD per month, on average. At the time of writing, 1 BAT is equivalent to 0.8 USD, so nobody will become a millionaire using this method. But once deposited in our Uphold wallet, BATs can be exchanged/converted, free of charge and commission, into any other cryptocurrency, be it BTC, ETH, ADA, DOGE or even USDT. It’s therefore a good option to start familiarizing yourself with the ecosystem, learn how to use a wallet, “hodle” our first satoshis (bitcoin’s minimum unit), or make our first “transactions”.
