I've blogged earlier about my idea for a new school. Not just another school like Elon's or even Balaji's, as much as I like the initiative, but a school on blockchain, with token-gated access to crowdfunded courses. It would turn education on its head.

The premise for the school is that the people we can learn from the most aren't typically the ones who get a chance to teach. 

Ask yourself: would you not want to teach an eager cohort of students on a skill you acquired or knowledge you accumulated over the years, but you've never been part of academia and/or haven't published, hence you've never had a chance to teach?

The School I am working on will give you that chance by giving teachers a platform to open a crypto crowdfunding campaign where students can stake your course: If your course get funded, you can teach it.

Let's decentralize who teaches what to whom

I believe such crypto crowdfunding is the best guarantee to academic freedom and uncensored teaching.

At the School, anybody who feels like teaching can propose a course and set their tuition fee. They use the School's site to easily initiate a crypto crowdfunding campaign, set the fee they'd like to earn, and when their campaign successfully closes they have a contractual obligation to teach.

It is a very powerful yet very simple mechanism to make sure those who want to teach get the students they quite literally earn: A free, open-outcry market for education, without any centralized censor deciding who teaches what to whom.

An entirely novel use case for blockchains and tokens

Blockchains have often been accused of a solution in search of a problem, and even today many in crypto wonder if we we will remain stuck in (Presidential) meme coins.

Education tokens however go beyond the ephemeral and leverage blockchains to make new models of decentralized education possible.

The design I have in mind for the School uses education tokens in three main ways:

• Students who contributed to a course campaign get a course-specific access token to gain admission to the course they paid for. These courses will be taught live and accessed online and (at a later stage) in person.

• Teachers will need to hold a minimum number of the School's native token in order to open a course campaign. Each campaign is a smart contract with students' funds held in escrow until the course has been taught, at which point the tuition fees will be distributed to the teacher's wallet.

• Users = owners. The School will not have a centralized ownership structure but rather be governed by its community of token holders, who include students, teachers, donors, benefactors, etc.

All points will convert into the School's native token at its Opening Ceremony. For now, we keep the name of the School and the date of its Opening Ceremony guarded, but expect an announcement soon!

Breakneck-speed development

We've started the project in earnest in August of 2024 and thanks to all the available decentralized tools (the unsung heroes of Web3!), we made great progress since. Here is the chronology:

1. Juicebox.money clone

   Late August, we started with the initial setup, cloning the open-source code of juicebox.money in our Github.

2. Infrastructure setup

   We then registered for service accounts with Pinata for InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage and the Graph for GraphQL queries.
   
   For those who are new to building in Web3, Pinata is a web3 media management platform that facilitates the storage and sharing of files on IPFS. It serves as an IPFS "pinning" service, allowing users to easily upload, manage, and distribute content in a decentralized manner without the complexities of managing their own IPFS node.

3. GraphQL integration

   After deploying the GraphQL schema to the Graph, we configured a subGraph URL for the project. A subGraph extracts blockchain data, processes it and enables rapid GraphQL querying.

4. Database setup

   We used Supabase for the project's database (which is what juicebox.money uses and it integrates well with next.js) and configured the environment variables for all services. For instance, we switched from Infura to Piñata for IPFS as Infura discontinued free IPFS support. 

5. Front-end designs 

   In tandem with the above, we contracted a UXUI design team from Venezuela and Colombia to start mocking up the site using Figma and defined the School's "brand" creating a brand book with logo, colors, and fonts. 

   I was personally very involved with this process and once I found a name for the School I registered its domain (still under wraps!).

   Using the designer's output, we then modified the forked code to align with the Figma files and refined UI components.

6. Deployment 

   To deploy, we created an account with Vercel and connected the project's GitHub and configured the environment variables and settings. Currently, the code repository is held in a personal GitHub simply because we want to minimize spend (as Vercel's free tier only allows for deployment of public repositories) but we can migrate to the a dedicated repository at any time by getting Vercel's pro tier. 

We now have a working site that looks very special and will soon go live to take early registrations and make donations to the School possible.

We will use the initial funds of the sale of the Foundation NFT to persuade an initial batch of teachers to stage a campaign, further adapt the smart contract functionality and build out the course platform.

Tech stack and spend so far

• Front-end: React, Typescript, Tailwind CSS

• Back-end: Next.js

• Database: Supabase, which works with PostgreSQL

• Blockchain integration: GraphQL, IPFS via Pinata, Solidity.

So far the project's spend adds up to around $5,100 including development and design and we budget around $5,000/month on further development until we see some donations come in, at which point we can revise the budget in light of the project's ambition.

This includes the design and eventual construction of a physical school, for which I already started to talk to architects, based on some initial sketches I did and a Lego model I built:

A possible list of initial teachers

I have a quite a long list of teachers I hope will be the first ones to agree to stage a course. Some I know, others I have a way in, most I just want to hear myself!

Here's a selection:

• Of course there's Vitalik and other crypto demi-gods incl. Balaji and Naval.

• The list includes several authors of books I enjoyed e.g.:

  • Bryan Caplan whose The Case Against Education stimulated a lot of my thinking;

  • I'd love to see David Deutsch, author of The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity, open a campaign.

  • Other favorite authors incl. Brian Greene, Stuart Kauffman, and other science authors;

  • Accessible mathematicians such as Edward Frenkel or Marcus de Sautoy;

  • In history, I hope some original authors would want to teach, irrespective of where they stand politically, as long as they bring a new perspective in the way of David Graeber (RIP) whose co-author of "The Dawn of Everything", David Wengrow, I'd hope would stage a course.

  • Any musician, irrespective of genre.

My list is a lot longer however in the end, I won't have a say in who teaches: it will be anybody who gets staked to teach by students incl. myself who help fund their course.

The legal stack

For the legal stack, we plan to establish a Decentralized Unincorporated Nonprofit Association (DUNA) in Wyoming to do two things:

1. Give it 501(c)(3) charitable status in the U.S. so we can receive tax-beneficial grants to support the School's workings. For this we largely recycle Elon's template filing for his school and are having a legal firm lined up to prepare the submission.

2. Use the DUNA as the School's and course token minting entity, which initially will have governance and access utility but may gain revenue-sharing features, depending on regulatory developments in the U.S.

We will start out with an UNA set to launch soon on otoco.io, which will automatically morph into a DUNA the moment we have 100 Foundation NFT donors, who will form the School's Council.

How YOU can help

1. Legal counsel: We're still looking for legal counsel who can help with the contractual side and the School's T&Cs, though much of the legal arrangement between teachers, students and the School will be enforced by smart contract.

2. Smart contract development: We identified how the Juicebox smart contracts will need to be modified (actually, simplified) for the needs of the School for which we will need Solidity authoring skills.

3. Teach! We need a first group of teachers who are willing to put a campaign up on our launch site and get voted in to teach live at the world's first decentralized School when it opens its digital doors!

4. Contribute: Join our Telegram discussion group to bring ideas or put your name forward/suggest names as teacher, and receive updates about our progress.