Brave never redirected users to referral links. We did have a bit of mistaken behavior in the browser's suggestion list. We offered affiliate codes as a way to support Brave development. If a user typed in a matching search term (e.g. Binance), our suggestion list would offer the affiliate link for the Binance site. This feature was intended for search input, but mistakenly matched fully-qualified URLs too (e.g. binance.us). We shipped a fix quickly, and turned the feature off by default. You can read more about that here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.