I’ve stepped away from academia to pursue a solution for a web3 public good problem: how do we get university diplomas on a blockchain? The need is obvious to all involved: fraud is rampant and your diploma is a stranded, undervalued asset instead of the cornerstone of your web3 identity. Imagine the possibilities of blockchain diplomas: LinkedIn could verify your university degree; Match.com could leverage your social homophily to identify new matches; my own Alumni Labs is building an exclusive social network for alumni; with blockchain diplomas a whole world of trust suddenly comes online. But, the corporate landscape is riddled with failed attempts (a VC once quipped to me, “university diplomas are a red sea”). Even university-borne, open source projects have failed (MIT’s promising “open standard” got bought by a credentials company and is now languishing with some ineffective business model). The engineering and technology isn’t difficult or complex.

So why have so many companies failed and why are most diplomas still — in 2022 — issued as decorative paper copies?

The reason is simple: as a public good, the adoption of digital university diplomas requires a unique business model. After surveying the field, I’ve come to the conclusion that any business model that requires licensing or usage fees will surely fail (exempting transactional fees for processing, i.e., gas). The only way to get university diplomas on a blockchain at scale is to build and fund it like a public good infrastructure.

Typically, governments are responsible for building public good infrastructures, but with web3 we have no need for governments. I think the solution is to build with web3 tools from the ground up. This means starting with the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a topic I’ve been carefully exploring and mapping for years.

A DAO is the perfect launch tool because it can bootstrap users and create onboarding bounties to ensure that a verifiable diploma network:

• has no “winners” (can have a fair launch by raising public goods funding for infrastructure)
• maintains the natural decentralization of university diplomas (no platform siloing) and ensures stakeholders own/control assets, and
• ensures that digital university diplomas are privacy preserving identity assets (e.g., proof of person/humanity) that are open source and freely accessible (can be programmatically verified with no/low fees)

Above all, I think DAOs provide the necessary organizational designs to express the web3 ethos and its values. Over the last few months I’ve been surveying “benefit” and “values-driven” DAOs and meeting with their leaders to learn more about how web3 can become a better, progressive version of the Internet. I’ve concluded that a progressive DAO is possible (the topic of my next essay). But, since DAOs are by definition acephalous (or leaderless) organizations they necessarily struggle to create strategic leadership (the topic of a third essay).

Inspired by Kevin Owocki’s example of transparency, I am making my progress and process visible. In collaboration with the Smart Contract Research Forum (SCRF), I am putting together an academic Web3 Workshop. I’m assessing potential web3 integrations (as much crypto as possible!). And I am pursuing non-equity public goods funding in an open and transparent way (starting with Gitcoin’s GR14 funding). I’ll continue to use this forum for product development updates and thought leadership.

If you are interested in learning more please follow Alumni Labs on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter. Or, join our community Discord to take part in our social movement.

If you would like to join our core development team please contact me at quinn@alumni.xyz. I have an open door policy, so if you are working on DAOs, especially purpose- and benefit-DAOs, I would love to sit down and chat. Book a meeting with me.