You're missing quite a bit of context here. Brave distributed tokens to users (from our User-Growth Pool of 300M BAT) as a means of ramping-up this new support model. Users then, in turn, could send received tokens to verified creators. If they wished to send the tokens to an unverified creator, the tokens would go [back to Brave] (in a settlement wallet), where they would reside until claimed by the publisher. Meanwhile, at Brave, we would reach out to unverified creators who had a growing balance waiting.

The change we made kept the tokens on the user's device. We also introduced better UI/UX as well, with many thanks to our community for helping us spot some areas for improvement. Although I'm part of the team, I still stand in awe of those few days in December, 2018. A great, yet flawed, system was radically improved in a matter of hours with a few small (yet profound) changes. And it wouldn't have been possible without Brave's incredibly engaged community.