Web3 native education is a crucial component in propelling the mass adoption of Web3. It aims to cultivate more Web3 native users, especially young people, to enhance their awareness of data sovereignty and concept of decentralization. These young individuals will gradually become the backbone in exploring decentralized forms of organization and business models in the Web3 space.
While DeSchool team continuously improves the Web3 technical infrastructure, they are also dedicating significant efforts to community operations, with the aim of engaging an increased number of young individuals, particularly global university students, who are curious about Web3.
Co-founder Rebecca leads DeSchool's community operations. Rebecca is also an early contributor to SeeDAO and a community operation expert, driving SeeDAO community from scratch to becoming one of the most influential DAOs in Asia. Moreover, Rebecca is the initiator of Web3大學, leveraging her extensive experience in the education industry.
In the early stages, DeSchool quickly formed an active community of nearly a hundred lecturers and thousands of users through collaborations with SeeDAO ecosystem, arweave ecosystem, and numerous educational organizations. A significant portion of the community members are from universities worldwide, curious about Web3. For them, DeSchool, as a learning aggregation platform, serves as their gateway into Web3.
Engaging in a series of Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions, Rebecca and her team connected with various communities and blockchain associations from universities around the world. These university students hold a shared fascination for Web3, but don't know how to cross the threshold of cognition. Some have psychological fears of the unknown world and hope to find peers to explore with. Others have "already entered Web3” for over 6 months, yet haven't experienced using a crypto wallet. There are also student KOLs who have been active in the Web3 for one to two years, hoping for a product that can help their peers to understand the concept. More people are asking, besides speculating on cryptocurrencies, what else can we do in Web3? This scenario is not unique to a particular region or country - students across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia encounter similar issues.
In the face of these challenges, the second phase of the DeSchool community aims to "Establish connections with 1,000 university communities globally, with the goal of continuously channeling talent into the Web3 ecosystem.”
A significant number of young individuals regard DeSchool as their gateway to Web3, where they embark on a journey of understanding this new paradigm, acquire their first on-chain identity, and foster relationships with fellow explorers of the Web3 landscape. The protocol and products at DeSchool are designed with a vision to cultivate a knowledge graph based on the development of social relationships: consensus drives social relationships, which subsequently nourishes the knowledge graph. It aims to define an individual through their thoughts and ideas, define relationships through shared thoughts and ideas among multiple people, and discover opportunities for value capture by spotlighting individuals located within the most densely networked regions exhibiting the highest degree of consensus. Therefore, for the community, DeSchool's protocol and products potentially offer a 'professional' framework by aligning knowledge and skills, joining a social relationship, and further propelling consensus through project participation. Sustainable development of the project is expected to attract more participants, broaden social relationships, and influence a wider range of the knowledge graph.
While this vision appears promising, the current reality of the Web3 industry raises a question: what existing applications can absorb these influx of newcomers? DeFi? NFT? Only DAO. The biggest application of Web3 is DAO, and the number of real users continuously involved in DAO worldwide surpasses all other Web3 applications combined. In the Web3 industry, collaboration between individuals predominantly occur within DAO organizations. Globally, various DAO organizations are constantly exploring and practicing in cutting-edge fields such as the creator economy, the Web3 economic system, and novel business models.
The co-founders of DeSchool, KC and Shawn, are early members of numerous DAO organizations around the world, demonstrating robust capacities in dealing with international DAOs. The core team of DeSchool has engaged in dialogues with Polygon Lab, Bankless DAO, and various blockchain foundations during key industry events such as ETHDenver 2023, Hong Kong Web3 Festival 2023, and EDCON 2023 to jointly promote onboarding newcomers to global DAO organizations in the form of protocols. The core team of DeSchool was also invited to give speeches at these conferences, sharing their own philosophy.
DeSchool's primary objective is to onboard one million real users into the global DAO ecosystem, while helping these newcomers entering the DeSchool community to understand the principles of Web3, possessing chain-based identities, and building networks with other Web3 explorers. DeSchool also strives to facilitate the pairing of their knowledge and skills, thereby ensuring their seamless onboarding to DAO organizations worldwide.
Building on the concept of "Blockchains are Cities" by Haseeb Qureshi, we see blockchains as digital cities with their own unique visions, values, economies, and therefore attracts different citizens. DeSchool is committed to becoming a pivotal public infrastructure, fostering a decentralised, permissionless, and trustless environment to stimulate cooperation, innovation, and value creation. DeSchool aims to assist various digital cities in attracting new citizens who share common value propositions and cultural philosophies. Furthermore, DeSchool's ideology has gained recognition and funding from several public goods foundations, such as the Optimism Collective’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding and Gitcoin.
DeSchool will ultimately operate in the form of a DAO and will implement its own token economy model. It plans to incentivize outstanding content contributors and learners through mechanisms such as 'learn to earn' and retroactive airdrops. It is our aspiration to witness a steady stream of university students integrating into the DeSchool community. Our hope is that they will not only be users of the product but also active contributors, growing alongside DeSchool in the form of a DAO over the next decade.