Decentralized education

For a while now, I have been ideating the concept of a decentralized school. I have a sense it will probably be the last venture I have in me and my masterpiece!

A decentralized school is also a genuine use case for blockchains which, a decade after smart contracts emerged, remain - according to reports I get from Token49 in Singapore - "98% trading and 2% building".

My idea for the school - or at least the physical premises for a school - goes back more than a decade, when I worked with starchitect Norman Foster on the design of a boat and received a genuine masterclass in architecture.

My first sketches for a physical building date from around that time, 2013-14, when I was drawing floor plans and cross sections for how I imagined my school would look like: open, airy, peripatetic.

With stops and starts, including the involvement of a friend-architect who unfortunately died in 2023, I recently made a Lego scale model of the school. Its design is not that different from my early sketches, and I know I will eventually build the physical premises for the school.

Token-gated access to courses

But for now we're focused on the tech side of the decentralized school, building the online site and authoring the smart contracts - or rather tweaking open source Solidity code - to get to a stage where we have a display-case website so we can go out and evangilize about the school's mission and attract initial teachers. A physical building can follow later.

The idea is to token-gate classrooms, giving access to online live courses to those students who bought a course-specific NFT.

For a project like this I don't want to exclude the U.S., the world's biggest educational market. But knowing how easily Gary Gensler is offended, how to go about issuing an access token that will not be considered a security?

Soul-bound NFTs that gate access to an online space are arguably less likely to be seen as an investment contract, but the school will also need a governance token to keep it community-owned.

In addition, the token should be freely available so anybody who owns it can propose to teach a course, which I see as a fundamental tenet of the school to make sure the teaching remains uncensored and the school open to any ideas. Only if a majority of the governance token holders votes against a proposed course will it not be taught.

Another factor in the equation is that the school, when we get to actual incorporation, will be non-profit, most likely as a 501(c)(3) in the U.S., so wealthy donors who like to support our cause can do so in a tax-deductable way.

Do the DUNA

I've recently been doing some research on the Decentralized Unincorporated Non-Profit Association (the "DUNA"), a new form of Association in Wyoming which I also blogged about in the August Otonomist.

The DUNA may solve the equation of issuing a governance and access token to the widest possible community of token holders, including U.S. residents, who collectively "control" the school as Members.

For a DUNA to be validly constituted, it would need at least 100 initial Members "joined by mutual consent under an agreement, that may be in writing or inferred from conduct, for a common nonprofit purpose", according to Wyoming's DUNA law.

I've been exploring with lawyers if the mere fact of buying a token on a decentralized market place could act as consent "inferred from conduct" which I believe it can, but obviously this has not yet been tested.

Another way could be for an initial crop of tokens to be airdropped to 100+ holders, who under the terms of the airdrop would then consent to be Members of the school.

Though the DUNA may have its origin in demands by Venture Capital funds in the U.S. to come clean about some investments they made in DAO tokens of projects that remained "entity-less" and whose tax status is hence ambiguous, it may tick most boxes for the use case I have in mind for it.

As a next step, we're looking into the filings to get the 501(c)(3) non-profit status, using Elon Musk's filing for his (centralized) Foundation school as a basis.

In parallel, we're building the school's site and started to approach the first teachers, essentially a long list from the Web3 community but also authors, artists and academics.

Launch will only be 3Q2025 at the earliest as there is still a lot to do, also because for now I run this project on the side of my desk.

Expect periodic updates on progress via our dedicated Telegram channel. Contribute to the project by collecting this post's NFT for only 0.02 ETH.