Brave claims to be 2-8 times faster than Chrome & Firefox on popular news sites. If Brave is based on Chromium, no ways it can be twice faster than Chrome. If it based on a new developed browser kit, it’s too fantastic to be true. It’s already a respectable performance if a new browser kit can come close to the unicorn browsers like Chrome & Firefox (Quantum). The whole thing is too fishy for my taste.
It's faster because it neither loads nor displays the ads, which are a huge portion of the page weight. In my subjective experience using Brave, I'd say 3-4x is about right.
BTW, the rampant inefficiency and bugginess of ads is what prompted me to install first AdBlock and then Brave in the first place. I have no problem with viewing ads or supporting content publishers; I do have a problem when the sheer weight of all the ads and trackers they include on their page means I'm waiting 10+ seconds for the page to load and there's a good chance of it locking up entirely. If the damn ad networks would just follow best practices regarding efficient & robust JS serving I wouldn't block them, but they don't, so I do.
As others have pointed out, Brave is much faster largely due to us blocking third party ads and trackers. These can account for more than 50% of your data at times. As a result, blocking them will result in better performance.