The official story is that Brave runs a revenue share program, so if they wanted to use "real money" they would have to be a licensed money transmitter. To side

The official story is that Brave runs a revenue share program, so if they wanted to use "real money" they would have to be a licensed money transmitter. To sidestep the regulatory issue, it is much easier to use a cryptocurrency for the payout and punt all the KYC/AML requirements to a crypto exchange. "Why BAT and not just use another existing crypto?" Well, they tried! They started with Bitcoin, but no one wanted to use BTC to tip or contribute, which is kind of a problem if you want to build an alternative monetization strategy for content creators.