Purchase referral code swap thing? As far as I know, nothing like that has existed. There's a ton of FUD "reporting" about Brave out there intended to drive users away.
There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.
As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.
Wasn't their entire original premise the Basic Attention Token? It was some kind of crypto that you'd buy and then the browser would block ads for you and instead pay a small amount to the website owners. Problem was if the website owner wasn't part of the program they'd just keep the tokens for themselves, something like that.
OK that does ring a bell. The whole project always seemed a little on the scammy side and I wasn't sure what the browser actually brought to the table that Firefox didn't, so why even check it out?
Much better performance on less powerful hardware (I don't care about synthetic benchmarks, do your own testing and you will notice the difference).
Vertical tabs. Built-in tor support, built-in efficient adblocker that supports ublock origin rules, but is complied into native code.
More anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting measures (in total, and only counting those enabled out of the box). Configurable shortcuts for absolutely everything. Probably something else I'm forgetting.
Plus a bunch of crypto bullshit, but it's disabled unless you make an effort to enable it.
