Brave Rewards Card Waitlist Tops 131,000 Ahead of BravePay Rollout

Signups have roughly doubled since Brave’s Luke Mulks shared early numbers with us. The card and its self-custody stablecoin payment layer aim to turn BAT into an everyday spending currency, not just an ad-viewing reward.

🎥 Watch the full interview: Luke Mulks (Brave) on The Cryptocoin Show on YouTube

The waitlist for Brave’s upcoming Rewards Card has climbed past 131,000 signups roughly two months after opening, a sign that demand for a card that earns Basic Attention Token (BAT) on everyday purchases has not cooled off after launch week. The card is the first customer-facing piece of BAT Roadmap 4.0, the privacy browser’s most ambitious payments push to date, which also introduces BravePay, a self-custody stablecoin protocol designed to move Brave’s 122 million monthly active users from ad-based rewards toward everyday, transactional crypto use.

When Brave VP of Business Operations Luke Mulks sat down with The Cryptocoin Show in August, he said the waitlist had pulled in 66,000 signups in its first three weeks. The count has about doubled since then, and all of it has come before Brave has named a card issuer, a reward rate, or a list of supported countries.

Why the Number Matters

Waitlists are cheap to join, so raw signups are not the same as funded cards. But the figure is doing real work for Brave right now. Mulks framed the early 66,000 as proof of demand heading into card issuer negotiations, and a list that keeps growing weeks after the announcement news cycle strengthens that hand. For context, Brave says roughly 5 million users are already opted into Brave Rewards, which means the waitlist is still a small slice of the audience Brave can market the card to inside its own browser.

What the Rewards Card Does

According to Brave’s official waitlist page, the card is built around four pitches: earn on every purchase, earn while you browse, earn from your existing BAT balance, and no hidden fees. Signups choose between a virtual-only card usable immediately, or a virtual-plus-physical combo, with the physical card mailed after signup. Availability depends on the user’s country, and Brave has not yet named a card issuer partner publicly.

Mulks described the card as a bridge for non-crypto users rather than a crypto-native product: “you can save it in the browser wallet. You can put it in your other payment apps too,” he said, comparing it to loyalty programs like Starbucks Stars. It is a familiar mechanic wrapped around a self-custody stablecoin balance instead of a traditional bank account.

BravePay: The Protocol Underneath

BravePay is the infrastructure the card sits on top of. Per Brave’s BAT Roadmap 4.0 announcement, it’s a stablecoin-based payment layer built for self-custody and privacy, letting users send and receive funds through .brave addresses using GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoins. Brave has said an SDK will let third-party apps integrate BravePay directly, and the protocol is also the on/off-ramp meant to make converting between stablecoins and fiat close to instant, whether that is for a coffee or a water bill.

“The card mechanism is really an awesome thing to use here because it’s kind of like a Trojan horse in a way for bootstrapping all this.” Luke Mulks, VP of Business Operations, Brave

Mulks tied the card’s economics directly back to BAT: a percentage of revenue generated from card spending and BravePay protocol activity is earmarked for BAT buybacks, which Brave will disclose through its Transparency and BAT Ecosystem Growth pages. He pointed to early data suggesting meaningful transaction volume: “the average purchase amounts on these crypto cards is between $1,000 and $2,000 a month,” with three to five purchases per user in that range. Those numbers, he said, dwarf the “couple bucks a month” users have historically earned from ad-based BAT rewards alone.

Timeline: What’s Confirmed and What Isn’t

• Now: Waitlist open at brave.com/card-waitlist with 131,000+ signups; no issuer named yet.
• This fall: Public UX testing is slated to begin for the unified Brave Wallet, which will combine self-custody crypto, BravePay, and traditional debit/credit cards in one interface.
• By end of 2026: Brave’s stated goal is to lock in a card issuer and open at least virtual card signups. “If sooner, better, great,” Mulks said, “but there’s a lot of things to navigate.”
• Q1 to Q2 2027: Broader wallet and BravePay protocol rollout, per Mulks, as part of a roadmap he described as spanning roughly 16 to 18 months.

What It Means

The card and BravePay represent a shift in how Brave positions BAT: less a reward for tolerating ads, more a rewards currency tied to spending. Mulks argued this matters because advertising-funded models are already under pressure. He cited AI answer engines pulling 20% to 90% of web traffic away from the destinations that used to host ads. Shifting BAT’s demand source toward card and protocol revenue, rather than ad buys alone, is Brave’s attempt to keep the token’s economics relevant as that shift plays out.

It’s also a distribution play. Brave says it has 50 million daily active users and roughly 5 million already opted into Brave Rewards, a base Mulks argued is close to crypto-ready without needing a “crypto-native” onboarding flow. “We just have to meet them with something that they’re familiar with,” he said.

What’s Next

The near-term milestone to watch is the card issuer announcement, which will determine which countries get access first and what the actual reward rate looks like. Neither has been disclosed. Brave has also said its ad notification unit will sunset by the end of 2026, underscoring how central the card and BravePay are to the company’s next phase of BAT distribution.

Conclusion

Brave’s Rewards Card and BravePay are still pre-launch, but a waitlist that has doubled to more than 131,000 without a single detail on rates or regions suggests the appetite is there. Whether Brave can land a card issuer and ship on its own timeline will be the real test of BAT Roadmap 4.0’s most visible feature.

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