I wrote up something about this back in March, if you care to check it out at https://community.brave.com/t/psa-bat-ad-prices-explained-kind-of/479458/1

TL:DR

* Ad revenue for the world decreased significantly, with some companies seeing it drop as much as 50%.

* Crypto scare from FTX, Genesis, Binance, etc has impacted world of crypto, which slowed ads and interest a bit.

* All in all though, BAT earnings haven’t changed as much as we think. I can show earnings back in 2020 where I was getting 1-6 BAT each month, which is what I’m still getting now. It just feels worse because BAT was worth up to $1+ whereas now it’s only like $0.22.

* And yes, there was a small portion of 2022 where earnings was incredibly high. Brave did awesome and we were getting up to 20-30 BAT per month. But this was short and not usual.

Gemini lost integration for new profiles and also is experiencing difficulty relinking if you’ve been connected for a while. Essentially new connections are down and it’s random if you can reconnect if logged out.

This has been a known issue for a while and is something on Gemini’s end. I just checked in yet again today and it’s being said no updates to be known except it’s still a work in progress. I’m going to assume it’s just going to be down for a while and wouldn’t expect it any time soon.

As to saying only available in UK, that’s not it at all. Last it had been active it was for USA, Canada, and UK. Then Gemini all but pulled out of Canada and it narrowed it back to UK and USA. But then all integration essentially dropped, especially for any new Rewards profiles.

I think you and a lot of others are misunderstanding a lot. Practically since Rewards was first introduced, you have always needed a custodial account in order to do anything other than tip people.

Throughout the years, vBAT has had a lot of strain from fraudsters. Lots of people were using emulators, junk cell phones, etc in order to “farm” vBAT and then they were selling it to others. So they’d sell you 300 vBAT for the price of maybe 150 BAT or something. These earnings would go unreported and not necessarily used for anything legal. And the transactions in themselves were a violation of Terms of Service.

In addition to that, there have been millions of people who reinstalled devices and all, losing access to their Rewards. So let’s say there are 63 million active users, but then there’s more than 100 million Rewards accounts in addition. The majority of those are inactive. That’s a lot of money Brave has to set aside “just in case” it’s someone who still might be intending to use Brave but maybe just wasn’t active with it for whatever reason (like deployed in military, in hospital, or whatever).

The burden that this was placing on everything got to the point that Brave decided it couldn’t be delayed anymore and vBAT is being sunset. The next stage in the process is for them to do on chain payments. From what has been said, this means no custodial partners will me required. It will also allow for peer to peer tipping, which Brave will do with BAT but also discussions of integrations to allow any exchange of crypto directly to and from Brave Wallet.

But before they can do that, they needed to clear out any vBAT and settle accounts. So they are purging everything, giving several months’ notice to everyone and giving the opportunity to withdraw vBAT.

What you’re speaking of would be a violation of Terms of Service and could get accounts suspended. That doesn’t mean people still aren’t doing it, but if they get caught can get in trouble. Plus just because someone offers doesn’t mean they will, it would very easily be a scam. I mean, I could tell you that I’d send it to you after you tip me, but then what happens if I wouldn’t send it and I instead keep it?