Great question! It is vaguely similar but different in many important ways. To be clear we do not see Brave as a direct competitor and wish them success. While they have referred to us as competitors, I believe that is a bit of an overreach. First of all, Steem tokens (and the Smart Media Tokens others will be able to launch on top of Steem in the coming months) can be transferred in 3 seconds with zero fees. This enables us to connect money to "likes" or in the case of Steem "upvotes." Brave is a pay-to-play system that uses an Ethereum token which is both slow (10 minutes) and has fees. Steem, on the other hand, is a protocol which anyone can use to build applications that leverage this crypto fuel engagement without adding paywalls or cognitive load. The crowd acts and money flows the most valuable members as determined by the stake-weighted vote of the users. In short, the Steem blockchain is protocol that the Steemit team launched and leveraged to create steemit.com but anyone can use it to fuel their app, INCLUDING apps that serve the same use case as Brave ... but with real-time fee-less transactions (i.e. better). If you'd like to learn a little more about how the system works you can check out the following video featuring yours truly: https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA
Community Liaison, Steemit