Open Campus (EDU) is a protocol built to save education by tokenizing educational content.
Its goal is to mint and trade courses and course materials as nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The hope is the trading of the NFTs can generate revenue for educators.
Ultimately, Open Campus will allow educators to control the digital rights to educational materials. This will drive decentralized education which allows educators to fund their activities by selling co-publishing rights to educational content.
Open Campus Publisher NFTs
Creators and the Creator Collective can create Publisher NFTs which they will sell through a marketplace. Open Campus will share revenue with content creators, co-publishers, and partner platforms.
Publisher NFTs will grant educators the right to market content and earn a portion of the revenue it generates. Hence, they propose to turn educators into content creators.* Content creators can determine what portion of the revenue they sell. They claim the Publisher NFT Marketplace will enforce Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements through Blockpass.
KYC refers to banking laws that require depositors and customers to verify their identity. They claim decentralization will allow educators to operate independently and students to create and control their own education content.
Additionally, they claim blockchain can allow permanent and transparent learning records. They hope to create tamp resistant records and certificates that are easy to verify.
The Open Campus DAO and Council
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governs Open Campus. The DAO allows all Open Campus customers to vote on proposals.
They hope to keep fraudsters out of the DAO by giving a five-member EDU Governance Council veto power over the DAO. The Council will verify and validate proposals and reject proposals that do not meet Open Campus policy.
Moreover, the Council will also administer proposals the DAO approves. They will initially appoint five Council Members for nine months. In the future, the DAO will elect the council members.
EDU Token Open Campus (EDU)
Users can use the EDU token to reward content creators and co publishers. They can also use the EDU to mint educational content as an NFT.
Another hope is that the EDU token will allow partners and other educational platforms access to Open Campus. Future uses for EDU could for NFT purchases in the marketplace.
Another use could be smart donations to support Smart Donations. Contributors could track donations on-chain ensuring that the money goes where donators want it to go.
There could be a decentralized peer-review system. In the future, partners such as Educational publishers could use EDU to monetize their publications such as textbooks.
The Open Campus Ecosystem
The Open Campus Ecosystem comprises the EDU Foundation, the Creator Collectives, Co-Publishers, Future Open Campus Protocol Initiatives and a Peer Review System.
The EDU Foundation manages the protocol and sets up the web3 infrastructure. They will finance the Foundation by charging a percentage fee on all EDU and NFT Publisher Marketplace Transactions.
Creator Collectives are groups of content creators that come together to market materials in the Publisher NFT Marketplace. Copublishers buy Publisher NFTs and sell the content.
The DAO will approve all Future Open Campus Protocol Initiatives. A Peer Review System checks all materials for quality and accuracy. There will be Scholarships and Grants funded by Smart Donations.
What Value does Open Campus (EDU) offer?
Educational materials are big business. For example, the US textbook market generated $7.85 billion in revenues in 2020, Statista estimates. US textbook revenues fell from a high of $11.97 billion in 2014.*
However, there is no evidence that the Publisher NFTs exist or that Open Campus is selling them. Hence, Open Campus is a proposal for an ecosystem rather than a functioning protocol.
Yet, Mr. Market has some faith in Open Campus. For example, Open Campus was CoinMarketCap’s 20th most trending cryptocurrency on 28 June 2023.
Conversely, Open Campus (EDU) was the 182nd largest cryptocurrency, with a 64.05₵ Coin Price on 29 June 2023. CoinMarketCap gave Open Campus a $120.31 million Market Capitalization, a $39.63 million 24-Hour Market Volume, and a $641.705 million Fully Diluted Market Cap on 29 June 2023. They base those numbers on a Circulating Supply of 187.396 million EDU and a Maximum Supply of one billion EDU.
I think Open Campus offers no value because there is no evidence the Publisher NFTs exist. Moreover, there is evidence of a market for the Publisher NFTs. Hence, Open Campus is selling a theoretical product. Speculators need to avoid Open Campus until people are paying money for the Publisher NFTs.
*https://dao.opencampus.xyz/
*https://www.statista.com/statistics/185042/us-publishing-revenue-from-textbooks-since-2005/
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