Brave

NEAR Protocol posted a recap of its partnership with Brave, stating that Brave Wallet chooses NEAR Intents and Brave Leo chooses NEAR AI, under the tagline "Brave chooses NEAR." Brave retweeted the post, which links to Brave's blog posts detailing both integrations.

• The Wallet integration lets users swap across Bitcoin, Solana, Zcash, Cardano, and EVM chains via NEAR Intents without bridges or manual gas handling.
• The Leo integration deploys the assistant's LLMs on NEAR AI's NVIDIA-backed Trusted Execution Environments, adding cryptographically verifiable privacy that surfaces as a "Verifiably Private" label in the browser.

The tweets recap integrations announced over recent releases rather than introducing new features.

Brave is joining as a core sponsor for Breakpoint 2026, Solana's flagship conference, set for November 15-17 at Olympia London — the event's first edition in the UK. The announcement came via a post from Solana Spaces on X, which Brave retweeted.

• Breakpoint 2026 sponsor list also includes Jito, Phantom, Alchemy, Pyth, Metaplex, and WalletConnect, among others.
• Last year's Breakpoint in Abu Dhabi drew more than 7,200 attendees from over 100 countries.

Brave News can now be opened directly in the browser's Sidebar. Users click the newspaper icon in the sidebar to pull up their custom, private news feed at any time without navigating to the New Tab Page.

• The feature was a long-standing user request, tracked as issue #29147 in Brave's browser repository.
• Brave announced the arrival in a post on X, showing the sidebar news panel in action.
• The change adds Brave News to the existing set of sidebar panels alongside Leo, Favorites, Reading List, and Playlist.

Brave's desktop update (v1.96) now shows math equation answers directly in the address bar suggestions when Brave Search is the default search engine. Typing an equation into the browser bar returns the calculated result alongside the suggestion, and the same calculations appear when searching on search.brave.com.

• Addressing the same theme, v1.96 also introduced equation rendering in the AI assistant Leo, letting it display math formulas in chat responses.
• The update bundles the new math handling across the address bar, Brave Search, and Leo in a single desktop release.

Brave replied to a user report on X saying a fix would be out in a few hours, linking to a new commit in the EasyList filter-list repository. The commit, "Update Playables," adds a rule to custom-lists/youtube-playables.txt that hides YouTube's "Playables" horizontal card list on youtube.com.

The change extends the existing filter that removes YouTube's Playables section for users running Brave's content-filtering lists. It's a small filter update rather than a browser release, and addresses the specific rendering case the user flagged.

Brave v1.95 for Android adds dynamic color support, letting the browser's theme match the device's color palette. Users can enable it under Settings > Appearance > Dynamic colors.

• The update also brings stability improvements, better layouts for large screens, and an updated rating prompt that lets users opt out of future review requests.
• The release was highlighted in a retweet by software comparison site AlternativeTo.
• Brave is also rolling out a separate desktop release with Leo conversation sharing.

Brave v1.95 on desktop adds the ability to share Leo conversations with others via a generated link. Shared conversations are encrypted and can only be decrypted by the recipient through the link — Brave says only the sharer and the person given the link can read the content.

• Click the Share icon at the top right of a conversation, then "Generate link" to copy it to the clipboard.
• Shared conversations expire after 7 days; users can unshare any conversation under "Manage shared conversations" via the three-dot menu.
• The feature ships in v1.95 on desktop and has drawn attention from software comparison site AlternativeTo.

Brave now gives users the option to block YouTube Shorts. On mobile the toggle is under Settings > Media > Block YouTube Shorts, and on desktop under Settings > Shields > Content filtering > YouTube Shorts blocker. This is the latest feature Brave has added to let users filter or hide parts of the YouTube experience in its browser.

Brave's v1.94 update on Android includes under-the-hood improvements to YouTube playback, background play, and picture-in-picture mode. The changes shipped with the update released last week, and Brave is asking Android users for feedback on whether they notice a difference.

• Improvements target smoother YouTube video playback on Android.
• Background play and picture-in-picture behavior were also refined.
• Brave is soliciting user feedback on the changes.

Brave v1.94 on desktop ships two major Brave Wallet upgrades: native Polkadot support and private cross-chain transfers powered by NEAR Protocol's Confidential Intents.

• Users can now buy, hold and send DOT directly in Brave Wallet; the wallet also supports AssetHub, used for issuing and managing Polkadot-native assets.
• Confidential Intents lets users transact on Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum and Solana without a public trail, with transactions routed by default through a NEAR private shard; ZEC support is coming soon.

Brave says that later this year it will add Polkadot swaps and Web3 connectivity to the wallet.