Today we will be exploring how a learning community like KopiDAO will be utilizing NFT credentials to facilitate the learning experience that our students will get. This is just a concept of what is possible for the learning community at KopiDAO, not what is already executed in motion currently. There will be updates to this concept as KopiDAO grows with their community. That said, the aim of this article will be exploring the several benefits NFT credentials can provide to the learning community at KopiDAO.

NFT credentials is the start of our journey towards building a learning community that will be harnessing all the superpowers of a Decentralized Identity. Our theory is that education should be permissionless, distributed, and peer-to-peer. Students curious about a new topic in which learning materials are not readily available, will be able to quickly come together to create high quality course materials that will benefit themselves and the community that comes after them.

On Education:

Based on the World Economic Forum in April 2020, “Our education system is losing its relevance”, 60% of future jobs have not been developed yet, and 34% of students believe schools are not providing them with competitive skill sets needed in the job market. The managing director of 42, Sophie Viger, also said 85% of jobs in 2030 don't exist yet. The world is changing at a rapid pace and our education system is struggling to keep up, despite in today’s world, education has become a necessity for people to be able to thrive for a better life and solve bigger problems in the world.

In addition, the pace of change in technology and the reality of the post-pandemic world means that today’s children have to learn how to learn new skills not readily available in the current education system within multiple environments. These environments include physical (IRL) interactions, and digital interactions - online (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams) & virtual (AR, VR). Our education system needs to evolve, and according to Jeffrey R. Brown, Dean of the UIUC College of Business, there are 3 primary ways it can be done - education needs to be democratized, individualized, and accessible.

On The Rise Of Centralized Organizations:

For the past three decades, our lives have been increasingly digital and internet-enabled via interaction with apps, services, and devices to access a rich set of experiences. This unprecedented digital transformation in the history of modern civilization has allowed us to interact with companies and users globally in ways that were previously unimaginable.

However, there is one area that the internet has failed to optimize for, and that is digital identity. Users interacting on the internet often have to rely on middlemen to provide identity management. Each middleman manages its own identity management database, be it a social platform, an online education platform, or a digital bank. These platforms typically would not share data with others as users and their data represents the platform’s competitive advantage.

When users decide to switch platforms, their content and social connections are difficult to carry over. This leads to siloed identities since users' data are disconnected from one platform database to the other, which users often have to rebuild their social profiles from scratch when they move to a new platform. For the majority of users who aren’t platform-savvy, we are often stuck with a platform and constantly being targeted with content and ads that we didn’t opt for.

As centralized platforms achieve a strong network effect, they often sacrifice their platform users by extracting data for ads revenue. These platforms grow to be so powerful that they could leverage user data to develop products that cause psychological and societal issues like addiction, mental illness, and spreading false information. Over time, our over-reliance on these centralized platforms led to identity data being exposed to breaches, in turn affecting our social, professional, and financial lives.

On Decentralized Identity:

Decentralized identity is the concept that identity-related information should be self-owned by users in which they would attest and verify information about themselves from certified issuers. This way, users are able to better manage their identity and privacy online by revealing just enough information to apps, platforms, and devices. For example, a new user registering for a social platform need only present verifiable proof that they are over 18 without revealing unnecessary information.

Having a self-sovereign identity means we can share only verified information to different interacting parties on a need-to-know basis without disclosing other unnecessary (and often personal) information. Individuals can live many lives on the internet, just like in real-life where we choose how we show up and present ourselves in different social settings and environments. For instance, we would only present our decentralized credit score when taking a loan at a decentralized lending platform, we present our academic certificates & employment history when searching for a new job, and we present our passport when entering a foreign country.

As we roam the internet, we often have to share our personal information repeatedly with multiple online platforms. As we share more of our information that is eventually stored in private servers, we lose ownership of our data to the centralized organizations who own the private servers. Our data is used everywhere and anywhere, and we don’t get to choose how we want to present ourselves on the internet.

With decentralized identity, imagine we have a passport folder to hold all the verified claims that were made about us, one claim per page in the folder. And when we have to show a certain piece of information to gain access to several different platforms, we just have to show the page with the required claim to proceed on the platform. Furthermore, zero-knowledge technology also allows us to present our claim without revealing what the underlying claim actually is. For example, I can prove that I am above 18 years-old without the platform knowing my actual age.

Decentralized identity allows us to be the owners of our passport and hold the claims contained in the passport to ourselves without the counterparty knowing anything about ourselves but still able to verify the claims are legit.

How can we utilize Decentralized Identity to build a Decentralized Learning Community?

Decentralized Identity comes in many forms, each has its pros over the other. For instance, there are:

• Decentralized Naming Services (DNS)

• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)

• Verifiable Credentials (VCs)

• Soulbound Tokens (SBTs)

• Self-sovereign Identity (SSI)

• Zero-knowledge Identity

We will cover each of these types of Decentralized Identity in another article. For the purpose of this article, we will be elaborating on soulbound tokens (SBTs). In the simplest term possible, soulbound tokens generally mean tokens that are not transferable between wallets. You can mint a soulbound token to your wallet or receive it as an airdrop, but you cannot sell or transfer it to some other wallet. Example use cases of soulbound tokens are certificates. A birth certificate is issued to you by the government and will follow you for the rest of your life. Similarly, you will receive an academic certificate from a university that proves you have undergone the relevant training and education.

Soulbound tokens can be in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT), each of them is unique, traceable, and not easily replicable. For simplicity's sake, we call a soulbound NFT used in a learning community an NFT Credential. When a student in the learning community has undergone training and education, he will receive a certificate in the form of an NFT Credential. Since the NFT Credential is programmable and exists on the public blockchain, it is highly composable and easily verifiable by any counterparty.

The student will be able to take on specialization courses that pre-requires him to own an NFT Credential issued by the learning community itself. If there are open positions or bounty tasks available within the learning community, the student can claim these jobs directly using his NFT Credential. There is no need to go through a background check or verification process to know he has what it takes to get the job done. The process to claim these jobs would be instantaneous, as the job portal would scan through the student’s wallet and grant access when there is a valid NFT Credential.

Outside of the learning community, these NFT Credential holders could come together to create a network and support each other in their future work. Similarly, any partners and organizations that provide recognition to the NFT Credential issued by the learning community, can very easily track and verify the legitimacy of the student. All this convenience is possible because the NFT Credential is unique, has a specific and non-replicable tokenID on the blockchain, and it is accessible by anyone from the public.

From the above, it is obvious the NFT Credential has its cons. For example, a random stranger can take control of the student’s wallet and gain access to a suite of perks and benefits accorded to the NFT Credential. Besides, since NFT Credential on the blockchain is publicly accessible, anyone can easily track the student’s other transaction activity on-chain, thus losing his transactional privacy. These two areas are actively studied within the web3 space and it is only a matter of time when these cons can be properly mitigated.

By utilizing the NFT Credential, a learning community can inspire innovation and ownership among its students. The NFT Credential holders can later be airdropped creator tokens that allow them to create their own courses and study groups which will benefit the community. These community created courses can then be ranked via a Token Curated Registry (TCR) within the community. This way, we are able to democratize course creation while keeping the quality in check by the community in a peer-to-peer fashion. Plus, we no longer have to rely on centralized educational institutions to prepare ourselves for jobs of the future.

In short, we can view NFT Credential as a fundamental building block in a learning community that can be continuously built upon as deemed fit by the community. It is permissionless and immutable so even if a student no longer finds value in that learning community, he can form a new one and grant access to the rest of the NFT Credential holders. Using NFT Credential as a form of Decentralized Identity provides opportunity for students to craft how they want to present their NFT Credentials to the world.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of KopiDAO or its members.