Becoming Brave

How to setup a Brave creator's account

Sep 06, 2020

Along with the rest of crypto, I’ve been down a DeFi rabbit hole. For a while the Compound liquidity pool that had the highest $COMP rewards was BAT. So I thought to myself, I like money, how do I get some $BAT? And then it hit me, I can earn BAT on my newly launched website, EleniThinks, for content just like this! Now all I had to do was set up a publisher account and I was on my way to riches.

Of course nothing in crypto is simple for a non-programmer like myself. What should have taken about 30 minutes took me 2 hours (mostly due to all the Googling I had to do).

To save you all 90 minutes of your life, here’s how to become a verified Brave publisher, particularly when your account is built on SquareSpace. The high level steps are to set up an account, connect a wallet and verify your website (this is where the hiccup comes).

Step 1: Create a Creators Account

Brave login works by using your email. There’s no password to remember, they simply send you an email each time you want to log in and you click to verify.

Brave will ask you to set up 2-Factor Authentication. I suggest you do it and do NOT use your phone number as the second step. There is a well known and documented hack in crypto of hackers porting your cell phone number and using your cellphone to reset your passwords and steal your crypto (among other information). I like Google’s Authenticator Application (Android, Apple).

Step 2: Connect a wallet

You have two choices of wallet providers on Brave: Uphold and Gemini. For no particular reason, I picked Gemini, but either option is fine.

Connecting a wallet requires you to create an account. That account must be verified - i.e. you need to provide your driver’s license or passport as proof of identity.

I used the Gemini app to take a picture of my ID. The verification approval came back in 15 minutes.

Step 3: Add a channel

Brave lets you connect several different types of content creation to start earning BAT. EleniThinks.com is, of course, a website so I went with that.

And here is where I got stuck.

The first step is to type in the web address - easy enough.

But the second step asks you to pick a verification method and recommends “Downloading a trusted file.”

This does not work if you are using SquareSpace! The directions ask you to “Upload the verification file to the “'.well-known' folder on your domain (create the folder if you don't have one)” and I could not find this file for the life of me. I believe this has to do with how SquareSpace hosts my domain, but honestly, I have no idea (remember when I said I wasn’t a programmer).

I’ll spare you all the ways I tried to find this file and jump to the answer - use option B.

I went to NameCheap, which is where I purchased my domain. Then I navigated to Advanced DNS: