Author: Biscuit, Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

With more and more newbies entering the market, the Web3 education track is also heating up. According to the Rootdata platform, the number of Web3 education-related projects has exceeded 30, among which Buildspace, Proof of Learn, Encode Club and other projects have received more than US$5 million in financing.

Any industry needs to establish a mature entry and learning system, especially for the Web3 industry, which is still in its early stages and involves asset security. For a long time, exchanges have undertaken most of the user education work. They have drawn a part of the handling fees and invested them in user education, which can achieve traffic diversion and user conversion and achieve an ecological closed loop.

However, with the explosion of the on-chain ecosystem, users’ learning needs have quickly become specialized and systematic, and simple popular science articles are far from meeting user needs. At the same time, the number of industry participants has shown explosive growth, including technology learning enthusiasts, project interaction enthusiasts, and practitioners seeking career development.

Therefore, more and more Web3 education platforms have been born in recent years, either providing systematic technical education courses or establishing a web3 learning system through gamification to help ordinary users enter Web3 more conveniently. This article will explore how the current Web3 education track is divided? What are the characteristics of these platforms?

Web3 Education Landscape

At present, Web3 education platforms are composed of centralized and decentralized platforms, and no single platform has formed an "oligopoly". Each platform is working hard to demonstrate its own brand power. The advantage of centralized platforms lies in operations, while the highlight of decentralized platforms is the incentive system. Web3 education platforms can be roughly divided into three categories: general science, L2E platform (Learn to Earn), and professional courses.

General Science

Any user entering Web3 needs to understand basic industry knowledge such as concept explanations and project introductions. These contents are usually provided to users in the form of articles. Typical platforms include Binance Academy, Coinbase Learn, CoinMarketCap Alexandria, etc.

Specifically, these platforms are basically launched by industry giants with the purpose of attracting users and have a certain transaction orientation, but they have long maintained a good level in terms of the richness and timeliness of popular science information, and still play a major role in helping users learn basic knowledge.

In addition, some platforms will cooperate with project parties to provide partial rewards to users. For example, Binance Academy provides new users of the platform with the opportunity to learn blockchain knowledge and earn cryptocurrencies. Users watch video courses and then pass quizzes to get rewards.

L2E Platform

Learning to Earn is a popular learning method in the crypto field recently. These L2E platforms act as a bridge between crypto projects and users. Crypto projects provide cryptocurrencies and interaction requirements. L2E platforms create tutorials based on their requirements, and users learn according to the tutorials and earn cryptocurrencies.

An earlier attempt in this regard came from RabbitHole, which focuses on rewards for basic DeFi functional operations, allowing crypto novices to experience complex protocol interaction processes with a gamified mindset. Recently, the project also launched the Quest Protocol, which is open to project parties, allowing everyone to define interactive behaviors according to their own predefined conditions and deposit their own rewards for each relevant user.

Layer3 positions itself as a platform for Web3 learning, discovery, and contribution. Web3 ecosystems and communities upload tasks in the form of bounties, competitions, and projects on Layer3, and users explore the community and complete tasks to earn crypto or XP rewards. These characters will show users how to use and further explore decentralized finance (DeFi), Web3 games, Web3 social, Layer2 scaling solutions, and everything in between.

In addition, there is the Web3 social education platform Continuum, which allows creators/users to publish or watch content to increase community interaction rates and receive cryptocurrency rewards.

Curriculum Education

In the past, most crypto practitioners adapted to job requirements through self-study, which was difficult and inefficient. Developers usually exchanged technology in specific forums, and marketing, content creators, etc. were also distributed in various small circles. Subsequently, some universities opened crypto open courses, such as Princeton University, MIT, and Stanford University. Due to its forward-looking and practical nature, it met the students' need for knowledge and was widely welcomed. At the same time, a large number of blockchain developer student teams were cultivated.

At the same time, Web3 native course education platforms are beginning to emerge, helping users seek employment opportunities in the industry by providing professional and systematic skill courses.

Web3 developer education platform LearnWeb3 is mainly aimed at the developer community, providing a series of courses ranging from knowledge entry, dapp building to security prevention, and has developed special tutorials for public chains such as Celo and Flow. The project received investment from IOSG Ventures and Balaji Srinivasan in September last year.

Proof of Learn is a Web3 education platform that focuses on solving the skills shortage problem experienced by the Web3 economy and aims to allow users to directly obtain income and employment opportunities through its vocational education courses. Users can earn rewards while learning, mentoring others, and improving new professional skills. In January 2022, Proof of Learn completed a $15 million financing, with Animoca Brands and others participating in the investment, but the project's incentive education platform has not yet been officially launched.

DeSchool, strategically incubated by SeeDAO, is a learning platform for the crypto industry. Lecturers can use this tool to issue SBT education certificates to students who have completed the course. Web3 organizations can also use this tool to simplify the community education process. Projects such as Footprint Analytics and Plancker DAO have already opened courses on this platform.

In addition, 101 Blockchains also offers a series of web3 training and certification programs, which are characterized by helping developers obtain various blockchain technology certification certificates.

Challenges of Web3 Education Platform

Although Web3 education platforms are beginning to gain attention from crypto companies and investors, overall, the challenges at this stage are still quite difficult.

First of all, the current crypto projects have not yet reached the level of traditional applications. Due to the lack of supply, the entire cryptocurrency incentive system cannot form a positive flywheel of "project party--Web3 education platform--user". This may also be a helpless choice made by the Web3 education platform out of fear of "wool party". Perhaps SBT will become a solution. Relying on token economics to provide economic incentives to users can provide a large amount of data for project parties in the short term, but in the long run, users do not really have stickiness to on-chain projects, but tend to go to projects with higher potential returns to obtain airdrops.

Secondly, users have a weak perception of Web3 education platforms. In the rapidly iterating crypto world, it seems that no one is willing to sincerely engage in education. This also makes the Web3 education track lack a leading protocol, and even causes the platform to be busy issuing NFTs/tokens to gain profits, and users to target the project side for "wool rewards".

Summarize

With the expansion of the crypto market and the refinement of user needs, there are still a lot of opportunities for Web3 education platforms, and they play an important role in promoting the popularization of Web3 knowledge and attracting more users.

The L2E model is likely to become the mainstream framework of Web3 education platforms, achieving a win-win situation for project owners, platform owners, and users. However, how to balance the effectiveness of education and the inducement of incentives to truly enhance users' understanding of the industry is a big challenge for such education platforms. Course-based education platforms have systematic courses, which are more attractive to users with clear learning needs, and their development model will be healthier and more sustainable.