Braver, a forked derivative from the privacy-focused browser Brave, has been compelled to change its name to Bold Browser following a legal suit from a ‘certain party.' A brave top executive has since come forward insisting that they have had to defend their trademark.

Due to legal threats sent to one of our community members by a certain party, specifically looking to harm them financially because of what this browser is forked from, we are immediately changing the name and removing all association to "the browser that shall not be named".

— Bold Browser (@BoldBrowser) July 9, 2020

Following this move, Braver has since changed its name to Bold Browser, as announced on its official twitter. The post indicating that one of Braver's community members had been threatened with financial harm was, however, not keen to highlight the party suing them.

Brendan Eich, Brave's CEO, seemed to substantiate the allegations on his twitter, replying to a Brave user migrating to Braver. He insisted that Braver has to rename and get their infrastructure to support their fork. Further asserting that a trademark would be lost if not defended citing Mozilla and Firefox case.

“We defend our trademarks, just as Mozilla and all other trademark holders do … Open-source licensing does not grant a trademark license; the two are legally unconnected.”

Forks have been a popular concept in the open-source crypto sphere, with the community and developers' not agreeing on the same protocol and policies on how the project should proceed. The Brave fork, now Bold, came about when Brave came under scrutiny after a user exposed a scheme that redirects users to Binance-affiliated links, all while gaining commissions.

On further inspection of their source code by the community, they found that more websites were in on the scheme, including Coinbase, Trezor, and Ledger. The CEO has since apologized on Twitter, highlighting that the dev-ops were working to eradicate all adware, including one's focus on the Basic Attention Token (BAT). He, however, came out to defend Brave's position stating that this was a feasible way of generating extra income for the browser.

Brave still has a chunk of its users intact, recording at least 15 Million monthly users and daily active users' north of 5 million. The open-source browser has geared towards helping users privately secure their data.

The browser also incentivizes users to view their ads by rewarding them with their very own crypto BAT. This token is currently trading at $0.249669 with a market cap of $369,748,833, according to Coinmarketcap. In the last 24 hours, it recorded trading volumes of $125,014,729, with 1,480,958,645 BAT in circulation as per this writing.

A Bold Browser contributor has now told Cointelegraph of a potential “un-googled” chromium fork for Bold instead of leveraging the Brave protocol. The source cited this was attributed to the fact that the initial Brave code was chaotic and would bring about challenges in the case of an update rather than the legal implications.

“We plan to make Bold a Chromium-based browser that contains the features that people expect from privacy-respecting ad-blocking browsers, with next-generation integrations (such as web3 and ipfs), without any advertising programs or token reward schemes.”

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