To redeem or continue earning BAT from the Brave Browser, you will soon need to connect a custodial account

TL;DR: Brave is sunsetting the old rewards system, and to redeem and continue earning BAT you will need to connect to a custodial account. Either Gemini or Uphold. I'll summarize below, but you can read the details here: https://brave.com/rewards-changes/

Basically, BAT earned without a custodial account was really "virtual BAT" (vBAT), which isn't on the blockchain and is just a virtual reward. When you connected a custodial account, this vBAT was redeemed for BAT.

The most relevant paragraphs from the article is:

At the earliest, vBAT will go away sometime in April 2023. However, we want to ensure users have time to adjust to this change, so we will share more exact dates soon.

...Once the sunset deadline for vBAT is reached, vBAT will no longer be considered valid, and will be removed from the Brave Rewards experience. This means that even if you’re on an old version of Brave that still shows a vBAT balance, that vBAT can no longer be redeemed after the deadline.

I haven't seen this announcement spread widely, so thought I'd give any users a heads up.

Personally, I already had a Gemini account, so was pretty quick to redeem both my vBAT earned from the browser and from tips to my creator account. I'd guess that for many users with only a few cents or dollars in vBAT it might not be worth it to set up a custodial account.