The Rise of Brave and User Privacy + Navigating the 2025 Tech Landscape
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From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we're demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I'm your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API. ♪

Hey, everybody. Changing it up a little bit this week. I'm going to do a solo podcast. So it's great to be here with you guys. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff. We're about past the end of the second quarter of 2025. There's a lot of interesting things going on with the landscape on the tech side and with AI, with crypto, with Brave, with a lot of things we have going on.

And also, there's been some really interesting shakeups and changes on the regulatory side and on the ability for kind of entrepreneurs to kind of dig in. And so we also have some cool updates about the podcast itself, too. So I'm going to dig in on a solo episode today. So you're listening to me on The Brave Technologist this week.

Yeah, so why don't we go a little bit into May 2025 to January. There were a series of executive orders that were done in the U.S. by the new administration that really kind of reversed a lot of previous regulatory uncertainty patterns.

around the ability for startups, especially both on the AI and the crypto side, but specifically on the crypto side to really dig in, experiment and try to find a product market fit in the environment. This doesn't mean to get political, but it is just kind of a reality. You've seen that with some of our guests that we've had on the podcast that have talked about it, but at Brave, we've been

in a similar position, right? We launched our basic attention token in 2017 and been really all about playing by the rules and keeping our noses clean and building functional product and kind of introducing the benefits and the value of this to millions of users and new users, et cetera. And it has been an environment that's been really difficult to operate in where you don't know if you stray off of the script or dare to experiment what's going to happen if you're going to get enforcement action.

Because the SEC was deploying a strategy that really had a chilling effect on the market. They were going after big players, small players, players that had really legitimate use cases like library, which I spoke with on here with several people about. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you had them going after kind of celebrity related projects with NFTs. And then with some of the scamming projects too. And the things are going to be with new technology, you're going to have kind of pull from speculation and also from speculation.

people trying to test the limits of where these things are. And what's been really interesting about this year is it was about a week in January where a lot of that policy got reversed and you had different, not just on the administration side, but you've got regulatory agency changes that have been very different. Some folks might remember I had Hester Persson, SEC commissioner that

Last year, while the chairman, Gensler, was at the SEC and Hester went through some really great lengths of explaining some of the difficulties that they're dealing with and feeling some of the pain of entrepreneurs. And, you know, they couldn't even test with the software that they're supposed to regulate against, etc. And what we've seen is now Hester is actually leading the crypto task force at the SEC now. And you're really getting a course change in an environment where you can actually experiment and find microchips.

could fit. And there's also some stablecoin act and the genius act that are getting through Congress. And some folks might remember Austin Campbell, we interviewed last year, had on the show last year. He was talking about stablecoins then, but he's actually working with both sides of Congress to help advise them on what's going on with the stablecoins and have being a meaningful voice to pull both sides together on that regulation. And then on the other end of the spectrum too, you've got major banks and

institutions that have, whether it's ETF products or stable coins, are actually either putting assets on their sheets or reintegrating products that they had previously abandoned. And so there's a lot of renewed interest in the Web3 and crypto side. And on the AI side, it's similar too. It wasn't necessarily the degree of chilliness in the markets, but there was just an uncertainty.

And we're starting to see now where a lot of competition, a lot of things that were uncertain have been, or very volatile, are starting to get more and more shaped up and products are starting to find their fit. And the iteration has just been wild to see in the AI space. And

we've seen people kind of theorizing about the commodification of models and specialization of models. And now you're actually seeing that stuff hitting the road, which is, it's awesome. I mean, and you're seeing startups building with open source, you know, software with APIs. And it's been an area that's been super interesting to see. Even on Brave's side, we brought the Brave search engine to life several years ago. And folks that listen to the podcast with my colleague Jan Petrowski or with Josep or with JP Schmetz, where we

kind of dug in on the search side a little bit more. There's cases that you expect to see happen and take off and plan around. And then there's other ones that you adapt to. And the Brave Search API is certainly a case where we've adapted. And initially, we were kind of like, okay, well, are these AI teams going to train their models with our data? And then it was like, well, actually, they're going to start to just port in web results into

their chatbots and things like that. And then we're seeing all sorts of other use cases kind of developing and taking off. And it's been a really quick fashion. So it's really cool to see. And when you start to see that, hey, the web starts to look very similar if everyone's just using Common Crawler or a couple of different data sources,

What's made our index really great is that it's built from people that have opted in to help build it off of real things. And so when you look about garbage in, garbage out in a lot of these other scenarios, the cool thing, and this has been really neat to see is just the fact that if somebody wants to have a really clean base set of information, you're starting at the cleanest route with what we've been putting. So it's been really cool to see that part of the business grow and encourage anybody, if you're working on AI project and you're looking for kind of web data, web information, et cetera,

give our API a check out. I'm not trying to show it too hard, but it is a pretty excellent and it's not terribly well known. So the other thing that's been really cool around searches, we've, we put out our search, your AI answer engine into the, into Brave search and watching that evolve. We had Joseph on

On the podcast earlier, it was talking about first version of that where you just got a pretty simple text output. And then that's evolved to become more and more dynamic and getting structured data answers and getting multiple sources and having those things be cited and watching that piece grow and watching that piece get adoption has been really stellar to see. We're starting to see the point where we're reaching almost over 14 billion annual queries a year through Brave Search. And it's pretty phenomenal. I remember back when I joined Brave,

pretty close to the beginning of 2016, people were challenging whether people cared about privacy and no one cares. Everybody's kind of posting socials and all that. But back then we'd say, hey, I bet those people don't want their DMs to go down public or I bet those people have window shades on their windows at home. And that was kind of the go-to. What's really been wonderful and amazing is we're

close to breaking 85 million monthly active users in March and 14 billion annual brave search queries. These are not small numbers anymore. We

You're seeing a movement now of people who, when given the option to move to private a solution that's user first, that puts them in the driver's seat, cares about their interests first. And when you have an option out there that's in the market versus incumbent that puts everybody else before you and shares your information with all these different companies you've never heard of. 85 million monthly active users have moved with their feet to privacy.

Whether they care about privacy or not, or they care about the secondary effects or second order effects of having good privacy, whether that's a cleaner web UI, lack of ads on streaming and YouTube, and all these benefits that we get as takeaways, less data consumption, etc. These were theories or small scale experiments when we started at Brave. 85 million monthly active users. We have a line of sight to 100 million. It's a beautiful thing to see.

that more and more and more people are moving with their feet to user first and privacy. And if you're listening to this and you're a user of Brave, I just really appreciate that you've given us a shot. But also, I mean, this doesn't happen without the users. Everybody, if you go onto X, Reddit or Community.Brave or wherever, you'll see it's

You're not getting call centers or you're not getting faceless AI bots here, whether it's Brendan Eich or CEO or Brian Bondi or CTO and co-founder or myself or Samson or many other people on the team.

We're out there. We're talking to users. And we aren't just saying it when we say that we appreciate that users give us their feedback. We rely on it. We listen to it. It matters significantly. Without our users, we're nothing. And so that user feedback is so amazing. And we're starting to see whole new groups of people just kind of moving over and kind of back to the landscape. I mean, we've also seen some wild things this past several months where Microsoft

Mozilla, Firefox has changed their privacy policy, something to say things they never said they would say before. We're seeing with Google, not only did they deploy Manifest V3, but people are seeing the impact of their favorite ad blockers or privacy tools being

severely limited or just fully deprecated and no longer supported. And people that never would have considered us before are now out there advocating for people to make their home brave. And I really appreciate those folks too. We're not just a skin on Chrome. We harden the open source code base in our GitHub under Brave Browser. In the wiki, you could see deviations from Chromium. The team puts a lot of care into maintaining that list and really approaching us from the ground up. And to talk about people talking to users, I mean,

You see Ryan Brown, who we've had on the show out on X every day, he like fixed in web compat things and the rest of the team on a lot of the other team too, working on web compatibility and privacy. And it's pretty awesome. But yeah, I think that the landscape continues to change. Browsers are...

maintaining their importance. Search is important. There's all these like blue link business buzzwords throwing around. But the fact of the matter is people love standard search, especially when it's minimal and it gets them what they need. And we're seeing really cool ways that AI is like helping to improve upon the search result page in meaningful ways. And even with Leo, we really used to bring your own model

allowing developers and early adopters to kind of bring different models into Brave.io and a bunch of work the team's doing around like having the browser start to do eugenic things, things that Brian Bondi, our co-founder or CTO, was talking about when he was one of the first guests on the Brave Technologist. Some of those roadmap items that he was talking about how, you know, the browser level with AI, it could be a different type of an experience. And you're not just seeing that with us. I mean, there's the

The Perplexity folks are talking about making a browser now. Lots of interest from established AI companies into looking into getting into the browsing game. And the user agent has never been more important. At the same time, it's never been more important to really accent that it is the user's agent. And we're out here as a user first. Your user agent should be working for you. And so, yeah, I think looking forward into 2025, I'm really excited to see how things shape up. We saw this and we talked about this on the podcast several times, but almost everyone

Fortune 500 company has got some mandate around AI. And a lot of the great guests we've had on here have been talking about how that's been impacting their business and how they've been adapting. I mean, having everybody from Nordstrom's talking about like how AI has disrupted like 100 plus year old supply chains and processes and business models and is adapting and iterating there to eBay and a more new current example to PayPal, right? Like it's across the board and we've had some really great guests on who've gone

gone into detail on that too. But I think it's really an interesting time. There's a lot of doom out there. There's a lot of negativity and a lot of fear too on the timeline. But whether it's crypto or AI or just some of these things where we're really scratching our heads

developers getting locked up for building open source code, a lot of potential threats and impacts that that could bring. Seeing some of those things get reversed in the past couple of months has been really interesting. But I'm hopeful. I think this is going to be a really interesting year ahead. There's always turbulence. That's nothing new, whether it's in crypto or just in tech in general. You've always got to be iterating. You've always got to be adapting. But I think it is an exciting year that we have ahead.

And we're looking to kind of keep going in this direction with the podcast and keep going forward with some other fronts too. I mean, I think I did a solo episode around BAT, the basic attention token. We released a roadmap in November for BAT, RoadBat 3.0. I'm going to bring in everything

more and more on chain. We made some changes around rewards in Q3 and Q4 last year to help to remove some technical debt, prepare things to scale up. And we're looking at new ways that we can incorporate, integrate bad and scale up this attention economy. You know, advertising is

was a really great foot in the door. There's lots of other ways that we can utilize that. There's ways that the market has utilized that, that we're adapting. In March, we actually kicked off our rewards 3.0 upgrade. So we have a modular offer wall and rewards now. And we kicked off a rewards partner program too, where we're basically like looking at the field and,

I mean, this is something I think I've expressed this on the podcast several times, but with different guests, but we're coming in for crypto from 2015 originally, but seeing it's almost been roughly 10 years. The amount of actually usable products is it's pretty embarrassing that there hasn't been more. And there's looking at what's been happening with meme coins a year ago. We were doing some pilots with some of them.

And it was fun. It was community oriented, free launch, fair launch kinds of conditions around that stuff. But then you see PumpFun, which interestingly is a technology. Like I remember we did a part of a cohort with RGA Venture Studio back in 2019 and 2018, where one of the projects we were working with where they were trying to make it so that any brand can make a coin. And

leverage the community element and the ability to add value and associate with the brand and do this stuff on chain. There was a lot of excitement and buzz around that. And fast forward to 2024 and you see something like PumpFun and then you even see things like OpenSea before that, right? Where you could actually mint collections and things like that. It's been getting easier and easier, but now PumpFun is

They made thousands and thousands of coins getting launched today. And there's definitely a speculative in the bad that comes with that. The one thing that's going to be around, regardless of the speculative side of things, is the ability for a brand or a creator or a band or a small business with an existing customer base to go and center their community effectively.

add some value with it around Bitcoin. It's there now. And I think with some of the changes overhead that have happened this year, you can start to see, you know, the noise will calm down, but the technology will stay. And I'm really interested to see where that goes. I'm really interested to see where that goes with AI too. And I think this year is going to be a lot about, you

You know, we saw a lot of scams, a lot of junk and a lot of hype and some shameless hype. It's been difficult. But that said, the real players play the game, build the tools, build the products. I think there's never been kind of hunger for...

actual products that people can use in the space than there is now. And there's some really smart people working on that stuff and Brave's among them. I'm super excited for what we've got going on with that and with Brave. I mean, we've got one of the biggest holder bases of distributed tokens in the world. I mean, I think we're 14th on Ethereum as far as most distributed goes. It's pretty exciting. And the ability to get that cohort excited with some of the things that we're looking at doing right now is pretty excellent, whether that's token gating or

payment or really, really leveling up on the attention economy. So keep your eyes peeled for that. And part of this program that we've launched around the reward partner program, you've got this beauty of having fungible tokens and we have multi-chain support in the browser. And so you

We could do things with partners that have them field test some different utility plays, see what sticks, see what works. And we built this program to really focus on, can we give a cohort of partners enough time, enough exposure, and enough opportunity to try things out across areas?

almost every available surface to reach a Brave user that we can put you in and be there for them to adapt and also pull that cohort together to try things out together. And so far, we've got over 10 partners involved and probably have 30 or so by the end of the summer. But there's a really cool thing around the fungible token. They're out there.

developers can play with them communities can play with them we saw this guano coins mean coin our community the bat community launched on their own they actually built a guano cave where you can on Solana you can go lock up your bat and earn guano like over a certain amount of time they just did that it's

It's awesome. And they didn't limit themselves either. The Pudgy Penguins crew, they put together a Pengu coin, a meme coin, and the Guano team supported that too. It's just really, really cool to see this stuff. I'm really optimistic for where this is going and where AI is going. There's a Gen X stuff, seeing things from the browser, seeing how quickly...

video editing and generation, the tools available there to iterate have just been amazing to see. It's been really a whirlwind in improvements and through iterative progress. It's just awesome. And I'm super stoked to see what the team comes up with with Leo and continues to iterate on with search and how that evolves over the months ahead. To Yile, I mean, I think on the privacy front, you know, we had folks from Zcash on and we launched a shielded Zcash payments in Brave wallet. And there's never been...

It's actually, of all the areas I'm concerned about, I think that privacy is definitely up there at the top. You have a really kind of pivotal moment right now where more and more society is becoming cashless. More and more of what people are doing, browsing on the web, searching, their lives are becoming more and more digital. That's all being tracked and cataloged. And at the same time that we have digital assets that are becoming more and more popular,

It's not just in the U.S. that we're seeing regulatory changes. They have MICA regulation in Europe. More and more governments are either looking at being more friendly towards a broad array of assets or adopting something that looks like a central bank digital currency, which would be pretty dystopian. But governments are seriously looking at this stuff. And so with society becoming more and more cashless, the properties of transacting in cash are starting to change.

go away if we don't have something to replace those properties you're going to lose a very important and valuable anonymity traits that come with analog cache and so one of the reasons we're super excited around zcash there's other privacy innovation happening too all over the place i think that this year is going to be more and more focused on privacy too and so yeah there's lots of noise of turbulence you've seen scams come and go but i think that there's never been a hunger for

Getting that product market fit, getting adoption and the tech caught up. You can start to do some pretty wild things with blockchains now with AI. AI is getting integrated everywhere. So I'm super interested to see where that goes. We're going to have some guests on. I think you all are going to enjoy quite a bit too. That will be basically like showing how far the AI has been pushing the limits in a whole range of areas. And yeah, and I think on that basis,

that note too. I mean, like some cool updates. I think we want to share with you all too. First off, everybody listening. I mean, we rebranded and launched a brave technologist in around September of 2023. It's been really cool. We didn't know how it was going to go. And one of the things that was really key in doing that was, it was launching something that

was for users and nothing against B2B or marketing or whatever, but we're a user first company and having a way to bring, bring the voices, building the tech to people. It was super cool and letting people put it in their own terms and getting that to you all has been cool. The growth we've seen has been absolutely wild and feedback we've gotten has been really great too, but we were checking in. Yeah.

Since the initial launch of both podcasts, Brave Marketer and Brave Technologist, with the total, there have been close to 600,000 downloads of the episodes. Whether it's downloads or episode downloads through the podcast platforms or views on YouTube, et cetera, it's been...

It's a lot. I mean, like we haven't really, we're just making the shows. And what's also really cool is in, and I think the initial podcast launched somewhere around 2021 or so, the Brave Marketer. But in the short time we launched the Brave Technologist, we are over 430,000 downloads since we've rebranded this podcast.

500 million, I mean, 500,000 downloads is in line of sight, which is wild, you know? And so I just want to take a second and say, Hey, look, thank you all for listening to the podcast. I hope you're getting, you're getting your time's worth out of it. And I hope that, you know, enjoyed once again, I mean, I'm on X, Luke walks on X, I'm on, on LinkedIn as well. Like, but yeah,

If there's ever anything you want to see, send me a DM. They're open. But we're going to try to continue bringing interesting guests on. I've been really blown away by what many people on the team, Angelina, Sam, Shez, all of them, everybody and people that just come out to the podcast and say, hey, I would love to come on. We've had some amazing guests on this podcast, but we're going to keep that going. And I think one thing I'm really looking to do is

in the year ahead is to keep the focus on the technology, but like, let's hit some other areas that are interesting and see how AI is impacting, you know, the battle space or how, you know, AI and technology is impacting other types of category, whether it's education or health and wellness or family and home and all those sports or different areas. So we're going to have a bunch of different guests that are coming from different sectors and, you know,

One other thing that's been really cool, I mean, the feedback we've gotten has been fantastic. Keep it coming. We listen. I listen to every bit of feedback. I take it all in. So, you know, if there's ever anything you want to see, let me know. One other cool piece of feedback we've seen has been around brave staff coming on the podcast. And so we're going to keep doing that, too. We'll keep bringing you all more and more members of the team and more and more check-ins from members of the team that have been on before and some folks you haven't met yet.

And so we're going to keep bringing you voices of the people building the products that you're using with Brave and continue to bring on really cool guests and hit new areas and keep it interesting for you all. So yeah, if there's ever any topics you want to see, guests you want to see, hit me up. I'd love to bring them on. And the numbers are getting awesome. And yeah, another personal update too. I'm working on start construction tomorrow on a studio in my house. So we're start to see a little bit of change up in the background here, but it should be pretty rad. And I'm looking forward to it. Maybe I'll call it the Batcave or something. I don't know.

we'll see. But yeah, I think, yeah, doors always open for feedback, whether it's product, whether it's about the podcast, whether it's, you know, just want to say hi, hit me up here for you all. We're user first. We don't exist without you. And yeah, thank you all. I'm really humbled that,

We're almost at 500,000. That's way more than I thought we'd ever be at at this point. And, you know, it doesn't happen without you all listening every week. So really appreciate it. Let's see how we can get to a million. Yeah. And so, you know, that's covered a lot of ground there. Some cool updates from our side. Just stay tuned. And like I said, if you want to want to hit me up, hit me up on X or LinkedIn. Love to hear from you all. And thank you all again for staying tuned in.

Oh yeah, also too, I think one other cool thing, the team back, we did the AI Summit. We did some live recordings in New York in December that we released across January. We're going to do some more of those this year. So we'll up the game a little bit on that too and get some cool guests on. But there's something about having two people in proximity when you're doing these interviews. It's pretty cool. So we'll do some of those, I think, this summer.

And so stay tuned for that. And yeah, maybe some other live stuff. One other bit too, folks that want to get more involved, we have our back community calls every Tuesday on Brave Talk. If you follow me on X, you'll see I post a link every week, also from our base credential token account and from the back community account. So welcome everybody. Call us welcome, open to everybody. We also live stream it to X every week.

So stop by there if you want every Tuesday, two o'clock Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. And I host that one there too. But we have team updates from the community team and members of the Brave staff come on there too. And it's the door's open. We want to hear from you more. Let us know where you can improve. Let us know what features you want to see. Let us know what you want to see us do with BAT and get involved. Love it. Thank you all very much. Looking forward to the rest of 25. Let's go to a million downloads. Onward. Thanks, y'all.

Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven't already made the switch to the Brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave.com and start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately. Brave also shields you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff following you across the web.