Brave browser was accused of inserting a referral code to profit from the cryptocurrency trading website

Brave is a Chromium open-source web browser that enhances user privacy and security. Although there are quite a few improvements in privacy compared to Chrome, Brave was born to promote the use of a cryptocurrency developed by Brave himself, called BAT (Basic Attention Token).

After installing Brave, ad blocking will automatically be enabled. However, at the same time, Brave will reward BAT coins to users if they agree to receive ads. In addition, it also pays a commission for users to recommend friends to use (affiliate) Brave browser.

Brave pays BAT coins to users if they agree to receive ads.

Recently, Brave has suddenly been accused of inserting their own affiliate code into the web address bar when users access some popular cryptocurrency trading websites today.

The issue began to be widely discussed yesterday, when a Twitter user named @ Cryptonator1337 discovered that Brave automatically inserted a referral code when he typed “binance.us” into the address bar.

If you do not know, Binance is a cryptocurrency trading site and with that referral code, Brave Software will receive at least an amount equivalent to 20% of the transaction fee for each account created by the link. contains their referral code.

Notably, Binance is not the only website that Brave inserted the referral code on. Checking the open source code, it was found that the above function was added to the Brave browser for the first time on March 25, in which the list of websites with the introductory code included Binance, Coinbase, Ledger and Trezor.

In other words, Brave Software will receive a commission for every transaction made by accounts created using referral links. For example, for Coinbase, when introducing a new customer to use their service, you will earn an amount equivalent to 50% of this person’s transaction fee within the first 3 months.

In addition, the aforementioned programs also allow referrals – in this case, Brave Software – to view statistics about customers who create accounts with their referral codes. In addition to the number of participants, both Coinbase and Trezor reveal to users introductory figures about user purchases.

Brendan Eich’s co-founder and CEO, Brendan Eich, confirmed on Twitter that he thought there was nothing wrong with adding his referral code to the web address bar when users accessed cryptocurrency trading websites. .

However, due to backlash from the community, Brave developers had to add an option so users could disable this function. At the same time, the auto-insert feature of the aforementioned referral code will be disabled by default on the next Brave version.