The Blockchain University Builds Trustless Scholarships And Student Loans
We’re losing most mundane jobs to automation, and faster than ever. Naturally then, a set of specialized skills, or knowledge, is becoming an increasingly coveted characteristic in the learners and professionals of today. It is therefore critical to assign some quantitative values to them, which is what one0x intends to achieve. one0x is creating a knowledge sharing economy, where it is possible to earn credits for assimilation of knowledge. This is not restricted to specific times or areas. Blockchain University has now built scholarships as a smart contract based solution.
What is Blockchain University?
At the end of 2017, cryptocurrencies took the world by storm. The blockchain technology powering them ended up permeating almost every industry. Education has not been left behind either. With the demand for novel skills increasing everyday, the Blockchain University — the world’s first education platform on the blockchain — has come up with a truly novel concept of assigning quantitative value to our learning. It rewards users for contributions via knowledge. The Blockchain University offers incentives to both students and teachers, teachers can co-learn along with their students. Like all universities, Blockchain University too has built a concept which makes education and learning financially simpler in their system — which we’ve discussed in detail here.
In an attempt to emulate the real world, scholarships and student loans are on offer to keep the process as decentralised and incentivised as possible. The exchange of education takes place through one0x’s reward systems — Gyan and Karma.
What do we mean by a trustless system?
A trustless system refers to a system that does not rely on any single participant to uphold and verify its rules. Trust is distributed amongst the different participants, often through economic incentives. The idea of a trustless system has only recently become feasible due to the introduction of cryptocurrencies. Proof of work, cryptography, merkle chains and P2P networks are some of the concepts deployed to create a trustless and distributed system. Here, the interacting parties are not required to trust each other or a supporting party, since all the information is verified and stored on a blockchain that is publicly accessible and verified by all stakeholders.
None of the information is mutable, with smart contract based solutions functioning as digital, more efficient equivalents of traditional physical contracts. A smart contract stores the rules for negotiating the terms of agreement and automatically verifies the completion of terms in order to execute the agreement. Since a smart contract eliminates trust dependence on a third party while establishing business relations, the parties making an agreement can carry out direct transactions with each other.
Scholarships can be availed in order to participate in courses
How do Scholarships work in Blockchain University?
Everytime someone creates a one0x account, they are automatically subscribed to its Global Scholarship. This scholarship is public and covers all one0x services. Users can also create new scholarships which may be public or private, with a blockchain wallet that contains their reward tokens. When a user subscribes to a particular scholarship, he can opt out from spending his or her personal reward balance and use the scholarship reward balance as entry fees for their classes. Scholarships are an ideal way of incentivising and facilitating free learning on the platform. Scholarships can be privatised too. This means they can be filtered for specific people to join or avail the scholarship. Certain scholarships may also be available to people above a certain knowledge score (as is often seen in real life) or a minimum Gyan value. One person can be subscribed to any number of scholarships at a time.
All participants or peers on the Blockchain University are eligible to create scholarship contracts. The scholarships have their own Karma wallet address and a list of classes (teaching contracts) that the scholarship is extended to. For every student who participates in the course, a certain amount of Karma tokens are burnt from the scholarship. Students can be added or removed from the fund at the discretion of the scholarship owner. Global scholarship funds, however, have no such obligations or strict rules. They are applicable to all peers and participants.
Peerbuds has funded the initial bootstrap process in which all the Karma and Gyan burned by the learners will be provided through a scholarship pool. This scholarship pool is also created by Peerbuds. The transactions are being recorded on Ethereum. With time we hope to see the Blockchain University as a globally accepted form of learning and knowledge transfer.
