"1. Education; 2. Compliance; 3. Products and services; 4. Ignoring FUD, fake news, and attacks." Earlier this year, Binance Founder and CEO CZ tweeted about focusing on these four things in 2023. Education takes priority, demonstrating its importance to him.

Since then, CZ has repeatedly emphasized the importance of Web3 education in various occasions and AMAs. "Binance hasn't done well in the education field, so education is something Binance should pay attention to." In addition to verbal importance, Binance is also actively promoting Web3 education and has launched the leading Web3 education project, Open Campus.

As a community-driven Web3 education protocol, Open Campus aims to create a fairer education system by harnessing the power of blockchain technology, returning control to educators and learners. By tokenizing educational content, it facilitates the production of more high-quality educational content, increases income for educational creators, and allows learners to access a more diverse range of educational materials. Open Campus' innovation and foresight in the Web3 education field will revolutionize the global education market, which is estimated to be worth up to 5 trillion USD.

For the crypto market, Open Campus tokenizes high-quality educational assets from outside the crypto industry, introducing incremental changes and creating a new model called EduFi (Education+DeFi). It also opens up new narratives during bear markets.

With the continuous development of Web3 technology and its applications, the concept of EduFi will gain more recognition and adoption, and Open Campus will play an increasingly important role in it.

One, Web3 education becomes the most important new trend in 2023.

From the past two years of GameFi, NFT, Layer 2, to this year's Bitcoin incription, BRC 20, and real-world assets (RWA), etc., one by one, these specific sub-tracks have gradually become market focuses, also bringing alpha returns (excess returns) to early participants. Now that the heat is dissipating, the market is urgently looking for the next growth point.

Web3 education, as a sector with a fundamental, pioneering, and global position in the industry, has attracted increasing attention from institutions and individuals, including Binance, due to its relatively short development time and non-intense competition. Web3 education is an emerging field with high development potential and opportunities, and it will be one of the most important trends in the cryptocurrency market in 2023.

From the perspective of development prospects, comparing to the size of the traditional education market, Web3 education still has strong room for growth. According to World Bank data, the global education market size exceeded 5 trillion US dollars in 2020, and education investment in countries like China is increasing year by year. With continuous technological innovation and application, the size of the traditional education market will continue to expand, and it is estimated to reach 100,000 billion US dollars by 2030.

Although the scale of the traditional education market is expanding, there are also many problems and challenges, such as high education costs, uneven education quality, lack of education resources, and lagging education management.

The operating costs and tuition fees of traditional educational institutions are high, making it difficult for students with poor economic conditions to afford them; for poverty-stricken areas, inadequate educational infrastructure affects students' access to education. In addition, for education creators, they do not receive the income they deserve, and the income does not match the effort they put in. Furthermore, the curriculum system and learning resources of traditional educational institutions are relatively rigid and closed. While meeting the basic needs of students, they lack flexibility and innovation, and cannot meet the personalized needs of different students. Moreover, the current social development environment is changing rapidly, and educational institutions cannot update and adjust teaching content and methods in a timely manner, making it difficult to keep up with the times, adapt to social changes and development. Additionally, there are differences in the teaching level and quality among educational institutions, resulting in uncertainties in students' educational benefits.

The traditional education system limits learners and education creators, and the phenomenon of educational inequality is widespread. On the basis of the traditional education model, the introduction of new technologies such as blockchain may effectively compensate for the shortcomings of traditional education and meet the new educational needs of modern society.

Open Campus is a platform that combines educational creation with blockchain technology. The platform allows educational workers to create and share their innovative teaching materials. Students can choose the corresponding teaching materials according to their own needs. The community can create, own, and promote the content they want to know about worldwide. Especially for educational workers, tokenization technology can help them turn traditional educational courses into on-chain assets for students to freely choose, reducing the intermediaries' profit margin, effectively increasing the income of education creators, and gaining recognition from learners and the platform for their contributions.

The emergence of Open Campus is of great significance for optimizing traditional education models and meeting the educational needs of modern society. Therefore, Open Campus is highly anticipated by all parties, and Binance has also chosen it as the 31st Launchpad project and a benchmark for the Web3 Education track.

2. Open Campus: Tokenizing Educational Resources to Achieve Educational Equality

"Publisher NFT has earned me $9,767 in 5 months, as users are paying real money for educational content. There are no more intermediary costs, and teachers/creators now directly receive value." A content creator named "Misa Matsuzaki" shared her firsthand experience using Open Campus on Twitter.

Misa Matsuzaki's experience is not unique, but rather a reflection of the thousands of educational creators on Open Campus. Their sincere gratitude is also the essence of Open Campus: by tokenizing educational content, the contributions and efforts of educators are "seen" and "recognized," leading to substantial returns and, in turn, promoting the generation of more high-quality educational content.

Open Campus has built a comprehensive protocol layer infrastructure for schools, edtech platforms, and other educators to use, allowing them to bring their educational content to students worldwide. Educational content and courses can be tokenized as NFT, and the revenue generated from the content will be distributed to creators, holders of the NFT, and other contributors through smart contracts. The platform users are divided into three categories:

• Community (learners), who can create, own, and promote educational content they want to explore on a global scale and use blockchain technology to fund, co-own, and profit from educational content that meets their needs;

• Creators, who launch their content through Publisher NFT, granting promotional rights. Creators and marketers share publishing rights and can earn income based on their contributions;

• Philanthropists can directly support such educational initiatives through donations and can trace their donated assets through on-chain data.

For example, Xiaoxin now sees AI as popular, and as an AI expert, he wants to monetize his knowledge. Limited by his connections and popularity, knowledge payment platforms on the market do not recommend him, and Xiaoxin has been ignored for months.

At this time, Xiaoxin can register as a content creator on Open Campus and then generate educational content of his AI tutorials on the Open Campus platform for submission. After professional review and approval (note: mainly to prevent platform contamination by garbage information), Xiaoxin needs to pay with platform tokens EDU to create his content as a Publisher NFT and sell it on the market.

When the NFT enters the market, learner Xiaowang finds it very interesting and uses EDU tokens to purchase the course. Xiaoxin also earns income from selling the NFT. After Xiaowang completes the study, he will receive a platform course certification.

Of course, it doesn't end here. The "Co-publishers" on the platform find Xiaoxin's AI content of high quality and purchase the NFT for self-promotion. The NFT is then known and purchased by more learners. At this point, Xiaoxin, as the original content creator, can continue to receive secondary royalty income, but a certain percentage of the income needs to be given to the Co-publishers and partner platform.

To sum up, the biggest highlight of Open Campus is the combination of traditional education models with blockchain technology to create an education content market based on NFTs. In this way, Open Campus can not only protect the copyright and circulation of educational content but also meet the users' demand for high-quality educational resources.

The first company to adopt the Open Campus protocol is TinyTap, which is also a leader in the global education industry and one of the top ten highest-earning children's mobile apps on the App Store and Google Play. Currently, TinyTap has over 250,000 interactive courses, has been used by over 9 million families and has over 100,000 creators. It has also partnered with renowned publishers such as Sesame Street and Oxford University. Additionally, TinyTap is a star project on the BNB Chain, ranking in the top five of the most active dApps based on active wallet count.

In November last year, the first batch of TinyTap's Publisher NFTs generated revenue of 138,926 ETH (approximately $228,000), with half of the income going to 12 teachers (creators). The highest-selling NFT brought in $37,600 for its creator, which is 13.4 times the average monthly salary of primary school teachers in the Israeli public education system. Additionally, in May this year, Open Campus announced the launch of a $10 million global fund for educators, aiming to reward teachers and creators worldwide in developing K-12 educational content for Open Campus and its partner platforms. Applicants can be qualified teachers, educational institutions, or individuals or teams with subject knowledge. By introducing blockchain technology, Open Campus creates a more fair and inclusive ecosystem for educators, learners, publishers, and co-publishers. It ensures ownership of educational content while providing them with more avenues to acquire Web3 expertise, promoting the continued growth and development of the ecosystem. In this thriving environment, innovation, creativity, and knowledge sharing are celebrated and nurtured, creating a brighter future for education and bringing billions of educators and learners worldwide into the world of Web3.

3. Introduction of Incremental EduFi, a new DeFi format

After launching on Binance in April, the native token of Open Campus, EDU, reached a peak price of 1.69 USDT, representing a maximum increase of approximately 3300% compared to the IEO issuance price of 0.05 USDT. Currently, the price of EDU is around 0.74 USDT, still showing nearly 14 times increase. In fact, within the entire Open Campus ecosystem, EDU plays a crucial supportive role with use cases including:

• Governance: EDU holders can submit proposals to the protocol's DAO and vote on them (e.g., participating in planning the allocation of tokens to the ecosystem).

• Payment: EDU can be used as a payment method for products and services offered by the Open Campus protocol (e.g., TinyTap, where a certain percentage of earnings are allocated to Open Campus Protocol).

• On-chain revenue sharing: Contributors (including content creators, publishers, platforms) receive a share of the protocol's revenue in EDU.

• User acquisition: EDU can be used to incentivize and onboard Web2 users into Web3, as they can receive discounts when accessing products offered by protocol ecosystem partners (e.g., TinyTap).

• Content Ownership: Users can purchase joint publishing rights through NFT with EDU from publishers.

Here comes the question, is EDU a good investment target?

From the perspective of development prospects, as an ecological payment token, the value of EDU is closely related to the expansion of the Open Campus business. In fact, in addition to TinyTap, Open Campus has also partnered with many top education companies to bring these educational contents onto the chain, forming a huge pool of educational content.

For example, GEMS Education, one of the networks of private schools, has over 60 schools and more than 130,000 students in North Africa and the Middle East. Many other partners include but are not limited to Animoca Brands and Sandbox. Since these Publisher NFTs can only be minted with EDU tokens and must be paid for using EDU, the EDU token has become an indispensable part of this ecosystem.

Taking TinyTap as an example, the last auction of Publisher NFTs generated revenue that was approximately five times the normal revenue. The company's annual revenue is close to $10 million. After collaborating with Open Campus to tokenize educational resources, the revenue from Publisher NFTs may grow to $50 million, and the auction of these NFTs will also create a buying pressure on EDU, with millions of dollars' worth of EDU tokens eventually returning to the project's treasury. Furthermore, as these top education companies enter the scene, the volume of purchases and consumption of EDU will also increase.

What's more important is that these high-quality educational assets, by being tokenized and entering the crypto ecosystem, have liquidity and tradability, and can generate various new gameplay options. For example, Publisher NFTs generated by educational assets can be staked on the chain; if they are scarce resources, they can be fragmented and broken down into more tokens for trading. High-quality educational assets will also bring new incremental funds to the crypto market. All of these further provide new ideas and opportunities for the DeFi ecosystem, so it can be called "EduFi" (Education+DeFi).

Of course, the market generally has concerns about selling pressure from new projects, especially when the price has risen significantly, early investors may take profit or project parties may dump tokens. At the end of May this year, a large amount of EDU was transferred to a new wallet address, causing panic in the community. Afterwards, the official Open Campus team released a publicIt claimed that there was an error when transferring tokens, and no tokens were sold. The tokens have been returned to the initial wallet and will be unlocked according to the release schedule on the 28th of each month. According to the token.unlocks data, the current circulation of EDU is approximately 187 million, with a circulating market value of $130 million. However, in reality, the actual circulating supply is only around 110 million, mainly because most of the unlocked tokens are still held in wallets and have not entered the market. On July 4th, Open Campus tweeted that, due to macro fluctuations and market conditions, the unlocking time for early contributors, liquidity providers, and ecosystem tokens will be delayed by 3 months, while the release time for other tokens remains unchanged. Therefore, the actual circulating market value of EDU is only around $80 million, and the revenue from TinyTap alone can drive a decent increase in EDU. As a community-driven on-chain protocol platform, Open Campus has unique advantages in introducing partners compared to centralized platforms, such as clearer and more transparent revenue distribution. This will attract more partners to join the network, expand the user base, and allow educators to enjoy more network effects from their contributions. Thanks to the incentive mechanism, the supply and quality of educational content will also improve, ultimately creating a sustainable economic model and achieving long-term win-win outcomes. Whether from the perspective of token economics or actual application, Open Campus is an excellent Web3 education project.

At the end

Nowadays, the encrypted market has entered a bear market, and the overall trading enthusiasm in the market is not high. The entry of high-quality educational assets can effectively stimulate the market's internal dynamics, especially the concept of EduFi is expected to stimulate and lead a new wave. With the development of Web3 education, the concept of EduFi will gain more recognition and application, and Open Campus will also play an increasingly important role in it.

For Open Campus, it has shaped a new educational paradigm, ensuring that educational content is shared while retaining ownership of the works. It also helps increase revenue streams for educational workers and provides motivation for them to continue producing high-quality content.

In general, Web3 education can break through the limitations of traditional educational boundaries, open up new traffic entry points, promote the development of education without boundaries, and truly achieve educational equity, allowing everyone to have equal opportunities for education.