This is true. When you "receive" BAT in your browser, your browser is not a wallet. You can't send it to any address of your choice, or move it to an exchange that doesn't require KYC like Uniswap. The only place you can send that BAT you "received" is "verified creators" in the Brave ecosystem. It's much more like an IOU BAT than real BAT.

If you want to get real BAT that you could send to any address, send to Uniswap, or cash out, you must create an account on Uphold and complete full KYC before you can withdraw. That's when, invisibly, the IOU BAT becomes functional, cryptocurrency-like BAT.

It's like there are 2 BATs in reality despite the marketing. FakeBAT and RealBAT. FakeBAT only works within Brave's approved creators and is what you receive in your browser, and you can convert it to RealBAT which is on Ethereum and ERC20 compliant but only if you do KYC.

An addendum to my statement above: This also means, implicitly, BAT is not a private token. All BAT ultimately comes from people who completed KYC. This means that ultimately, if the government wanted to hunt down where someone's BAT came from, it's really easy when you've KYC'd the entire ecosystem.

And, you might be OK with that for what it is, and might not want money laundering. Fine, but don't advertise it to me as an extension of a privacy browser. This is perhaps the least private cryptocurrency ever outside of USDC.

Isn't this for legal reasons? I'm pretty sure my crypto exchange couldn't give less of a crap about my ID but due to anti-money laundering laws every exchange I've used has had to ask me for it.