Learning on the blockchain: What is one0x?

Governments all over the world drive themselves upon the very basic and ubiquitous chapter of our life — education. Universities and institutions around the world are working in their own capacities to break away from traditional barriers of walled education and defined syllabuses. Content is now being delivered through learning management systems(LMS) such as Google Classroom, Blackboard, and Moodle to name a few. Universities have come online to provide lectures to global students. Only the medium of knowledge has changed, the world still needs to work on many fundamental concepts such as free, unhindered education as a mode of learning and earning through rewards incentivization.

Knowledge economies or intellectual capital and its role in driving the economy ahead and upscaling the level of lifestyle individually has its direct links with learning and earning. But the transition surfacing in the education sector all over the world hardly addresses the core issues.

The Fourth industrial revolution explicitly informs us about knowledge as a form of currency which can be further used to gain additional knowledge, distribute current knowledge or use it to improve an existing product or service. We have classrooms as learning spaces, whether digital or physical; textbooks or ebooks as learning materials; and learning through tests, recitation often presided over by an expert either in the classroom or through video lectures. Still, 33% of the students drop each year out of the colleges in the US and student debt is at an all-time high. There is a severe disconnect between the learning and earning aspect of education and consequently, the motive and impetus to learn are lost with the sole aim of getting the degree.

What is one0x?

To cope with these widening gaps and to meet the demands of the learners of the 21st century, the power of blockchain can be leveraged — to track all learning, reward both the teachers and learners as they progress, and allow them to earn and learn simultaneously.

One0x a blockchain database addresses these needs to substantiate the vision of a knowledge economy and rewards incentivization. According to its whitepaper, “One0x is a global standard for building dynamic reputation and performance trails for every learner as he moves between learning various avenues.”

The platform works on the principles of:

• Quantifying the progress of your learning and creating a single global account for verifying the authenticity of every learning activity. It strives towards keeping an unbiased track of learning activity of each learner through distributed ledger over blockchain for life.
• It uses the concept of a positive sum game — where an expert with a piece of knowledge exchanges it with innumerable learners without losing it himself. This multiplication is an incentive and strength for both the learner and the teacher. Any such addition to the knowledge pool of the world is rewarded well on the one0x platform through its tokens.
• one0x will be a global ecosystem — where offline and online partners can collaborate and plug in on the blockchain, recording transactions, creating incentives and reward plans for learning. Later, these teachers would evolve to become mentors.

How does it work?

The platform employs an easy to use interface — anyone can plug in one0x’s API onto their platform to:

• Retrieve a student’s existing knowledge reputation and his performance trail,
• Add further skills to his knowledge base. and
• Track the impact of further teaching on a student through skill-based scores issued by various educators.

The Blockchain University, an online portal that accentuates decentralized learning on the blockchain is one such successful application of one0x. The platform seeks to radically change the learning and assimilating process on a global scale with online classes and workshops, hackathons and demo events, and public and private training programs to be shared by everyone and anyone. Each learner and expert on the blockchain university creates immutable trails of their learning experiences in various fields.

one0x’s Framework

one0x’s framework consists of three basic pillars:

• a set of APIs,
• micro-services, and
• infrastructure guidelines.

The unique identities of people on the blockchain, the creation of the immutable record of their learning activities and their verification are all in the functioning of the API. There are a few guidelines to be kept in mind while implementing one’s platform on one0x‘s API:

1. The platform needs to capture a unique one0x ID for its users, and uses the oAuth process to get access to the user data.
2. To start a new class or any activity for which knowledge score is required to be issued, the platform needs to create to create a new collection on the blockchain with a new ID and other basic details.
3. In case a new student signs up for a course, reward tokens would be burned from the student’s account. The previously created one0x collection will be linked to the user ID of the new user.
4. The end of each course would be marked by a flow to issue and record the final assessment of each student automatically.
5. The information about a user’s learning or teaching journey, earned credits and received rewards in single or multiple topics must be publicly displayed on their profiles through the profiles function to an outsider.
6. Upvote and review function is to be used to record upvotes by outsiders and review by participating members.
7. Every one0x account will be connected to a global scholarship account automatically, which is public and covers every one0x collection ever created.
8. Question APIs are meant for students who can put knowledge score bounty on questions they might have and mentors can earn points by answering those.

one0x microservices run behind the API functions and are responsible for certain response parameters in these functions. These include:

1. Transaction Indexing, a function introduced by one0x by which all the transactions executed within an ecosystem are indexed to enable search and advance collation across all entries.
2. Transaction Queueing, where all the public blockchain transactions are serviced in sequence irrespective of their confirmation time. The user flow is not tied to the success of the transaction which helps in keeping a journal record of all entries while users can perform these actions as off-chain actions if they fail.
3. Flow Routing Service handles the flow of transactions on to a private or a public blockchain. If required, the transactions can be shifted from one blockchain to another.
4. Witness Publishing Service is the governance mechanism of a private blockchain clusters whereby a cryptographic evidence is pushed from the private blockchain to a public blockchain.
5. Keys Management for wallet management and issuance of a public key to every user on an ecosystem is done by one0x too. Besides this, one0x also manages the KYC requirement of the ecosystem through its Identity and Access Management.
6. One0x also takes care of the buy and sell requests for its internal cryptographic token through Token Exchange on every ecosystem.

The advantanges of one0x

one0x as an infrastructure provides all-inclusive facilities to the platforms to build their infrastructure over it and enjoy multiple benefits. The scores issued by one0x and recorded on blockchain are tamper proof and independently verifiable. The educators can build and customize better courses to suit the needs of the learners according to their existing reputation. The educators can also charge over and above the course fee to add to the existing reputation scores of their students. Certificate usages can be tracked and fees can be earned for instant verification. Students can be a part of global blockchain community and build their reputation undeterred by any physical university or classroom boundaries. One0x employs maximum utility in terms of its connection between learning, sharing and earning through mutual cooperation which holds a huge potential in future as the knowledge database over blockchain continues to grow. It is, as such, empowering the whole knowledge ecosystem.

1. For experts, one0x brings utilities through the building of courses to reach better learning outcomes, create one’s own brand with tamper proof certificates, earn money from verification of certificates by the employers and track the impact of every certificate issued.
2. For learners, one0x brings convenient sharing and verification of knowledge data, higher employability around the world and create one’s own dynamic profile across multiple platforms over one0x.
3. For employers, one0x ensures better matching of candidates with the requirements, instant verification of candidates and surety about the candidate being genuine to make better hiring decisions.

one0x is here to empower the education sector and make it pervasive and accessible to everyone. You can learn, teach and earn at the same time, adding to your own as well as others’ pool of knowledge.