Launching BENcoin
The momentum of every community is in the exchange of value between its members. To galvanize the community around our mission — to educate and empower blockchain students around the world — we are launching the next version of our BENcoin initiative.
Last year, we ran a BENcoin trial with great success. Before launching a token, we tested our model using Airtable to keep track of everyone’s rewards. We awarded BENcoin to students who completed lessons in the BEN Playbook by our partners Algorand, Bytom, and OpenNode. Students then redeemed their BENcoin for conference tickets, flights, and airbnbs provided by BEN and our sponsors.
Today, we are finally ready to move onto the next step — tokenizing BENcoin into an ERC20 token on Ethereum.
Token Info
Contract Hash: 0x3112e6eeb095791cda8271c25a02a1e66018ade7
Total Supply: 10,000,000
Ticker: $BEN
Earning BENcoin
BENcoin can be earned by students, contributors, and community members for helping advance blockchain education and growing BEN through things like:
- Volunteering
- Creating and translating lessons, videos, and tutorials
- Completing lessons, passing quizzes, submitting tutorials
- Attending events, completing small tasks
- Bounties, competitions, and hackathon prizes
- Donations, sponsorship, and support
BENcoin will also be rewarded to BEN’s national chapters (BEN Italy, BEN Turkey, BEN India, etc) and university chapters (Blockchain at Berkeley, MIT Bitcoin Club, Rutgers Business School Blockchain Hub, etc) for growing their chapters and reaching more students on campuses.
BENcoin for Discord Roles
BEN is a six-year-old community of thousands of students and alumni who have gone through the program. Our students have gone on to work for major blockchain companies and traditional companies with blockchain departments. Others have founded startups in the blockchain space like Augur and Roll.
Oftentimes, companies contact us wanting to reach students for job opportunities, community developers, more users, etc.
The BEN Discord is one of the main communication platforms we use for students, alumni, professors, partners, and community members from all over the world with many channels such as #general, #trading, #defi, #nfts, and more.
Using Collab.Land, we are introducing a BEN Hats ranking system.
10 BENcoin is required to become a BEN White Hat.
50 BENcoin is required to become a BEN Yellow Hat.
BEN supporters on Patreon will receive 1 BENcoin per dollar donated (subject to change at any time) as a thank you, which they can use to display their hat tier in the BEN Discord.
Several Discord channels, including #jobs and #events, will be made read-only and can only be posted in by Yellow Hats.
This way, anyone who wants to post about their events, jobs, bounties, etc, can do so and support BEN at the same time.
Once we get the ball rolling, we’ll introduce more requirements and benefits for the other hat tiers.
BENcoin for Education
The BEN Wiki is our knowledge center, with lessons, slides, tutorials, and videos from our students, club leaders, professors, alumni, and partners around the world on various blockchain topics and in various languages.
Our first BENcoin initiative will be for improving the BEN Wiki as well as teaching and learning about blockchain throughout November. More details will be announced soon.
BENcoin for Financial Aid
In the near future once blockchain conferences and hackathons pick back up, we hope to bring BENcoin full circle by using BENcoin to sponsor student flights, airbnbs, visas, and conference tickets as we always have.
In the meantime, we will explore more online BENcoin ideas, such as
- BENcoin discounts for BEN swag.
- BENcoin-exclusive locations in Decentraland.
- Ad space in BEN’s newsletter paid for with BENcoin
- Exclusive NFTs redeemable with BENcoin.
BENcoin is NOT for Investors
For a long time, we explored how to make BENcoin non-transferable or students-only. Ultimately, we decided to go with a standard ERC20 token for simplicity.
BENcoin is not an investment. We are not seeking any exchange listings. The point isn’t to gamble, trade, long or short BENcoin.
The Blockchain Education Network is a 501(c)3 non-profit and BENcoin is a community token for BEN, like a Chuck E. Cheese token you put into the machine to play the game.
The innovation in tokenizing communities is the ability to earn and redeem community tokens in creative ways.
Stay tuned for future announcements for BEN and BENcoin!
