{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0057","slug":"basic-attention-token","title":"Basic Attention Token: Blockchain Based Digital Advertising","authors":"Brave Software","year":2018,"date_label":"2018","publisher":"Brave Software","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Storage and networks","topics":["Storage and networks"],"source_url":"https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePaper-4.pdf","source_label":"BAT white paper","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2018 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"Brave's 2018 paper for an advertising unit that pays publishers and users from a measured attention event inside the browser, rather than from a chain of third-party trackers. The browser is load-bearing. The token is the unit of account in the paper's payment flow.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/basic-attention-token","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/basic-attention-token","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/basic-attention-token","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Basic Attention Token study","href":"/whitepaper/basic-attention-token"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Ocean","href":"/whitepaper/ocean"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Livepeer","href":"/whitepaper/livepeer"}]}