For myself I've used brave for years but it seemed to go downhill fast when UPHOLD started to require KYC it seemed to scare a lot of people off from collecting brave rewards and the entire thing started to slow down drastically.

Brave prided itself on being a privacy focused browser but after KYC and getting hammered a bit it lost a good measure of that and trust within the community causing it to stagnate which you'll see in the monthly active users here. But also take not of the last month and we are going to jump into what might be causing this new spike in this article.

Brave + Filecoin + Zcash

A new team up between brave and filecoin was recently announced. If we take a moment to look at what filecoin is ticket FIL

as per their site Filecoin is an open-source, public cryptocurrency and digital payment system intended to be a blockchain-based cooperative digital storage and data retrieval method. It's made by Protocol Labs and shares a few ideas from InterPlanetary File System which allows users to rent unused hard drive space. Filecoin was released in 2014.

Zcash is also expected to team up with Brave.

This teamup will allow users to use the built in crypto wallet to send, receive and store the token along with a few other cryptos.

The biggest part of this team up between the three is it will be offering a privacy-based feature in Brave browser that offers private messages and media transmission.

Chainlink

An update from Chainlink shows it will be launching a CCIP otherwise known as a cross-chain interoperability protocol for the Arbitrum network.

Arbitrum is a token I've been waiting for some time now as it's gotten a good amount of traction and looks like development work on the chain is rather high. That's one of the key factors that brings in value to a blockchain is the amount of applications and usability it has. For example Ethereum is one of the most developed ecosystems even though it has the highest of fees. Development work and money flows to these systems. This net interconnection could be a positive move for chainlink.

NEAR

I only got into this one because of the Coinbase learn. Near will be integrating a new gateway called Mantle Ecosystem. It's a decentralized frontend on the ethereum layer 2 network Mantle. Now I'm not sure how "decentralized" it really is as the buzz word gets tossed around very loosely anymore.

Overall the entire crypto blockchain seems to be focusing in on decentralization and privacy once again. This focus seems to be coming full circle as we went from totally decentralized to trying to onboarding government/institutions back to seeing what a huge freakin mess that was into going back to the core again.

This move back to core fundamentals should start to bring true decentralized blockchains and applications front and center such as we have here on the Hive blockchain and Leo Finance. We will also see zcash, menaro and other tokens such as this who have solely been focused on privacy also return to the limelight as they get integrated into more applications.