BRAVO started in 2014 and set out to revolutionise the tipping and anonymous payment industry with their seamless mobile payment application. BRAVO’s minimum viable product (MVP) was built and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2015 where it won the Audience Choice Award. In 2017, BRAVO beta version was featured on ABC's SharkTank landing a deal with Mark Cuban & Lori Greiner. Since then, BRAVO has gained a significant amount of traction with a community of tens-of-thousands of users and millions of dollars worth in transactions.

After a successful proof of concept, BRAVO began building an innovative hybrid blockchain platform with a seamless user-centric mobile user experience that supports on-demand public and private payments using BRAVO tokens (BVO). BRAVO's goal is to make cryptocurrency payments as simple as a swipe on your phone.

BRAVOs' plan to achieve global impact and growth outside of the United States is in motion with implementation of it's own hybrid Blockchain along with data encryption with tokenization technologies to allow anonymous, secure and seamless transactions around the world with minimal fees, yet a simple user experience.

BRAVO is one of very few ICOs in the world that actually has a solution developed and proven traction with a fiat version available since 2015 in the U.S. market. In contrast, less than 9% of the ICO's come from established businesses and almost half do not have a product developed before their ICO campaign began.

In Q2-2019, BRAVO will release a cryptocurrency version with its own Token to allow for instant, secure and anonymous payments worldwide.

Features

BRAVO (and BVO token) is a well-balanced combination of blockchain technology and user experience that is ready for large-scale adoption as a cryptocurrency platform with a real use-case that truly serves the mass market.

BRAVO’s key features:

Anonymous fiat or crypto payments seamlessly in seconds powered by a scalable hybrid blockchain.
Find users nearby with geolocation or search directly by username or private code.
Hybrid blockchain allows alternating from traditional blockchain to anonymous blockchain on-demand with Incognito payments protocol for additional security.
BVO token solution capable of any type of payment including tipping, micro-payments and macro-payments.
Funds and payments are recorded (deposited) on user’s BRAVO account immediately (low latency) after transaction. Transactions recorded on the BRAVO blockchain cannot be altered or tampered.
Simple account authentication and recovery protocol to ensure full control and access to tokens and funds 100% of the time.
Funds can be attached to a private message via our in-app messenger.

Technical Info

Incognito Payments

BRAVO Blockchain will support two different ways of transferring funds: public transfers and incognito transfers. Public transfers are coin transactions that are logged and viewable on the blockchain. Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is possible to trace funds going from one wallet to another. For transactions that do not need anonymity and untraceability, public transfers using the BRAVO blockchain provide a fast, low-cost method of sending coin.

However, BRAVO understands that people value their privacy and wish to send funds anonymously when needed. To support this, BRAVO Blockchain will offer anonymous transfers of BVO Coin on-demand through what is known as "Incognito Transfers". This is achieved with the use of BRAVO Private Coin (BVO-P) through an algorithm that utilizes anonymizing technology, making it impossible to determine where funds came from and where they are sent to.

BVO-P will be integrated into the BRAVO mobile app and support an Incognito mode for payments and transfers while still maintaining the intuitive, easy-to-use interface of a public transaction. When a user wishes to send payment anonymously, BRAVO's incognito transfers work by performing the following steps automatically:

Convert sender's BVO to BVO-P
Send BVO-P anonymously to receiver
BVO-P automatically converted to BVO and placed in receiver's wallet

Incognito transfers require more computation resources and have higher transaction fees. Since incognito transfers are performed on-demand, users have the choice of instantly switching between the fast, low-cost public transfers and the anonymous incognito transfers.

Hybrid Blockchain

BRAVO is creating an innovative hybrid blockchain technology that consists of a public and private blockchain. The public blockchain is based on the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm while BRAVO's private, Incognito blockchain is based on an anonymizing Proof-of-Stake algorithm. The BRAVO blockchain integrates these two technologies together, which allows them to interoperate seamlessly, and gives the end-users control over transaction speed, privacy and cost.

Federated Byzantine Agreement

Understanding the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm requires understanding its predecessor, the traditional Byzantine agreement. The Byzantine agreement ensures consensus even if you have some misbehaving members in your network. This has two advantages. First, consensus can be fast and efficient. Second, trust is entirely decoupled from resource ownership. This means that a small vendor has as much power as a wealthy, large organization which helps keep them both honest. On the downside, all parties must agree on the exact list of participants. Generally, membership in Byzantine agreement systems is set by a central authority or closed negotiation.

In practice, traditional non-federated Byzantine agreements require every node to be involved with every transaction to reach quorum. This is akin to letting every city mayor in the state know you're about to plant a tree in your yard and getting most of them to agree to it. This is unnecessary and a waste of everyone’s time and resources. In BRAVO's FBA system, each node can decide whom to trust and be part of their decision-making group, which we are referring to as a quorum slice. Following the earlier example, you only have to let your neighbors know (your quorum slice) that you want to plant a tree in your yard and get them to agree to it. Furthermore, the system-wide agreement is reached when overlapping quorum slices communicate the transactions. To continue with the tree planting example, after you and your neighbors agree to plant the tree in your yard, you bring it up to your local city council, who in turn legitimizes the action for the rest of the city.