Brave's funding model always included ads [0], but these are supposed to "respect privacy" (ie not collecting personal data and targeting). Not sure how they are there right now. I know there was controversy in the past due to their "ads replacement" scheme where they were replacing ads in websites with their own ads, and my impression is that all this "brave rewards" thing did not go through much.

Similar notion of "privacy respecting advertising" has also been stated in mozilla's texts about firefox several times, eg [1], and that goes a long time back in general [2]. I don't think that any of these attempts from brave or firefox have actually worked.

In general, this is the business model (or part thereof) of many/most "privacy focused" services, ie serving ads while "respecting users' privacy". Duckduckgo does that for example. A few of them are even owned by advertising companies (eg startpage). Alternative models are subscriptions (eg kagi) and/or sponsorship/donations (eg ladybird?).

[0] https://brave.com/about/#:~:text=Brave%20Ads,-Brave

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...

[2] "we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users’ privacy and giving them control over their data" https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/05/21/providi...

actually go anywhere?

It hasn't gone away or sold out to Google.

Yeah, straight into the cryptocurrency trash heap.