Back in 2018, Brave gave tokens from our own UGP (User Growth Pool) to users. These tokens could then be directed to websites, YouTube channels, and more. If the intended recipient wasn't verified, the tokens would go into a settlement wallet. But note, the tokens people were sending were almost entirely those which they first received from Brave (it was not yet possible to earn rewards at that time). So users were getting tokens from Brave, then earmarking those tokens for content creators.

More details at https://brave.com/rewards-update/