According to Woofun AI, as a veteran token with a 9-year history, BAT has risen to prominence in recent market performance, with an increase of 182% in 30 days. Behind this sharp fluctuation is the Brave browser's effort to revive the value of the token through a new business narrative. However, its core contradiction is that despite the rapid growth in the number of users and search business, the token repurchase mechanism is shrinking in a cliff-style manner, leading to a significant divergence between prices and fundamentals.
In terms of business fundamentals, Brave did show strong growth momentum, but there is a clear decoupling between its core revenue stream and the BAT token. Looking back at history, BAT hit an all-time low of $0.055 on August 14, and the current rally has brought its price close to 4 times that low.
Notably, the token has no remaining unlocking pressure, which provides a basis for a certain chip structure for price fluctuations. In terms of user growth, Brave reached 128 million monthly active users in September 2025, an increase of 27% over the previous year, and stabilized at 55 million daily active users. Since introducing the 'Monetize User Attention' narrative in 2017, Brave has promised to distribute 70% of ad revenue to users in the form of BAT.
However, as the focus of the business shifted, search became its core pillar: processing 2.5 billion queries per month, having an independent Search API, and achieving approximately $100 million in annualized revenue in the first quarter of 2025. According to JP Schmetz, head of the advertising business, search ad revenue grew fivefold in 2025, and this explosive growth was largely driven by intelligent AI. Brave's Search API is the first search tool built into OpenClaw due to its agent-friendly full-web indexing feature, and is expected to become a pay-per-call infrastructure layer for AI laboratories, enterprises, and independent developer agents through the x402 protocol.
Despite the promising future of the business, search revenue is not skewed towards the BAT token. According to data compiled by Woofun AI, Brave's purchase amount of BAT shrank sharply from a high of around $13 million per year in 2021-22 to only $140,000 in 2025, and completely stopped buying after October 21, 2025, and the browser advertising business has actually been marginalized.
Faced with the declining utility of the token, Brave released Roadmap 4.0 on July 9, which aims to restructure BAT's value capture mechanism by entering the payments sector. The roadmap lays out new products such as stablecoin debit cards, unified wallets, BravePay, x402 and MPP payments, and AI royalties for creators. For BAT holders, the new incentive model includes: Brave will take an undisclosed percentage of the money from the new product revenue to buy back BAT and distribute it as a reward; users can earn BAT by swiping; earned BAT can be locked into BravePass to obtain premium benefits; and setting reward tiers for BAT holders. Brave promised to publish a dedicated token economy article later in 2026 to refine the rules.
Meanwhile, market expectations for new products are heating up. The waiting list for Brave stablecoin cards has surpassed 200,000 people, and related code is entering GitHub one after another. Some of these work orders were closed on October 6 and 13.
However, this buyback mechanism has four major structural flaws: first, the repurchase ratio has not been disclosed and lacks transparency; second, the core product has not yet been launched, and the card currently has no clear cashback ratio or launch date; third, the repurchase is not destroyed; the BAT purchased will be redistributed as a reward. Given the probability that most of the rewards will be sold, this has formed a cycle rather than a net reduction; fourth, the high-growth search business was excluded. As early as December 2022, Brave hinted that it would be “within the next few months” Eligible for BAT earnings, but now its help page clearly states that search ads are 'not eligible for BAT benefits', completely cutting off the biggest revenue stream from the token.
Financial model stress tests based on the above mechanisms have not yielded positive results. With BAT's current market capitalization of $315 million, approximately $16 million of BAT would need to be removed from the market each year to achieve a net repurchase yield of 5%. Considering that if users sell 70% of their rewards, Brave will need to buy about $52 million in BAT every year, which is about four times its peak in 2021-22. If calculated at a 25% repurchase share, this would require new products related to the roadmap to generate approximately $210 million in annual revenue. In contrast, competitor EtherFi Cash has reached $2 billion in annual spending. Brave must rapidly grow into a leading crypto card and make other new products a huge success before BAT's fundamentals have sufficient support.
Although Brave has 128 million users and has an advantageous position in the AI payment narrative, and stablecoin cards and no pressure to unlock are also positive factors, this new offensive essentially repeats the old story: BAT is used as marketing bait for new products, and once the product matures, the token value may be downgraded. The new roadmap even provides a way out, pointing out that various initiatives “may not be a priority over time,” and that “the timing and amount of money will change” for repurchases. Although this is not malicious, a bearish situation with a 'chronic rug' is a realistic likely outcome. As a result, BAT is currently more like a speculative trade betting on the publication of a token economy article than a reliable exposure to Brave's business growth.