Want to know what Bitdegree is all about? That was how i felt as well initially until i read the white paper. Interesting project with great potential i must say.
SUMMARY
The conventional centralized higher education system takes 4-6 years to educate a person and there
is no guarantee of employment afterwards. We believe that the digital industry today lacks workforce
because higher education institutions are not responding to the needs of actual labor market. Most
of the skills needed by the digital industry don’t even require a degree in higher education. Workforce
that has practical digital economy skills and willingness to learn is needed. That is why today more
and more tech-savvy teens get freelancing jobs and earn more than their parents do.
BitDegree is world’s first blockchain-powered, smart-incentives based online education platform
which will revolutionize global education and tech recruiting. The main purpose of the BitDegree
platform is to let Students acquire skills that are currently required by the labor market. The way to do
it is not to ask business what skills they need in the far future (3-5 years), but to respond to explicitly
expressed skilled labor demand quickly. BitDegree will directly align the incentives of students and
anyone who wants them to become knowledge workers in digital economy - like current or potential
employers, digital service providers and sponsors. Smart-incentive is a smart contract on Ethereum
network ensuring the exchange of tokens between a sponsor (the Incentive Creator) and a student
(the Incentive Taker), who is committing to study a specific subject in order to receive tokens (the
Incentive). The BitDegree platform will offer students online courses with a clear and transparent
blockchain-based reward system and achievement tracking. Our use case for blockchain is not
sensitive to prolonged waiting periods before transactions are committed, thus, overall platform
overhead (as in expenses) of using Ethereum network for transactional and immutable data storage
needs, will be low. To make the learning process as exciting as playing Minecraft we will use Octalysis
framework of gamification design.
We see BitDegree as a unique tool for business to recruit tech talent and shape global education to its
needs through smart-incentives. National government Job centers will be able to track the demand of
skills without having to involve scrupulous report gatherings from businesses and also help jobless
citizens by subsidising studies for skills on high demand. Think about it as Coursera and HackerRank
merged together, powered by blockchain technology. The main benefit of BitDegree platform to
incentive providers is the possibility to initiate and maintain dialogue with upcoming talent and
reward them for achievements through smart-incentives. Smart-incentives on the BitDegree platform
will range from small to large and be location and topic targeted. From the student’s perspective, it
means getting paid to learn new skills based on local demand, which not only incentivizes but can
actually be a viable escape from unskilled work.
Building quality, interactive, and engaging learning experience is essential to every successful
education platform. There are attempts to solve the problem: i.e. Coursera and CodeCademy. Despite
the fact that these frontrunners face abysmal course completion results, similar to the entire MOOCs
industry – just 5%, these two companies together are worth more than $1 billion today. Our proposed
incentive alignment approach was not tried in any of educational platforms we are aware of. A merit
based rewards, currently practiced in existing platforms, does not substitute income needed to
support a student while studying.
We will be pursuing our vision to go forward with the development of BitDegree platform even in
case of unsuccessful ICO. We anticipate a closed testing, involving incentive providers in [2018Q3]
and open launch of BitDegree in [2019Q1]. The capital available to the development of the platform
will determine functionality and choice of the course material available. The anticipated capital
raised during ICO, will enable us to directly compete with existing education platforms even prior
to the benefits reaped by the popularity of BitDegree platform. Companies creating technologies
used in digital economy should consider contributing to development of the platform, and ensure
technologies they create are represented in the course material available to millions of students.
WE BELIEVE THAT:
Everybody in the world deserves access to proper education, no matter the gender,
race, age or religion;The key to success of any technology business is to hire the best and well educated
talent, therefore, business is ready to invest in talent;The state education system is flawed and needs to be democratized, decentralized
and otherwise disrupted;Blockchain-powered smart-incentives and gamification features they enable are the
game changers.
SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
Employers looking for tech talent
Service provider looking for educated customers
People seeking knowledge and digital economy based
employmentSynthesis of the problem worth solving
BITDEGREE: IT IS ALL ABOUT EDUCATION
We are proposing a digital incentivized studying platform as a new tool to grow the global tech talent
pool. Companies in need of tech talent will provide financial incentives to students willing to participate
in training courses and to develop their skills. Companies seeking to get people familiar with newly
introduced technology or services, will provide financial incentives to students willing to spend time
to learn and to try the company’s offerings. By providing incentives, any company explicitly signals
the demand for certain qualifications, or informs about knowledge and skills needed to effectively
use newly introduced technology/products/services. People looking for new opportunities will learn
new technologies, develop practical skills in demand, and get familiar with existing technological
solutions provided by solution providers. Job seekers will enroll to subsidized courses to get more
knowledge and to develop skills within selected technology topic. The course materials and learning
process will be made interactive and in a highly engaging way by following field-proven gamification
methods. Students will be able to communicate with other students and course mentors, to pose
questions, and seek for more detailed explanations. All course material and progress assessment
will be divided to small chunks in order to enable short-term effort in the reward cycle. In addition
to subsidized course material, each student showing learning progress will be rewarded with
platform Tokens. Companies providing incentives will be able to get in touch with students enrolled
in subsidized courses, and possibly offer employment positions for good performers. Companies,
offering to accept Tokens for services, will allow students to deepen newly acquired skills, while using
commercial services offerings. Students will also be able to exchange Tokens on exchange platforms.
The BitDegree platform will register progress of each student, and will provide ways the students can
prove they overcome the challenge of developing and applying skills to solve problems. BitDegree
will rely on Ethereum platform to enable incentives scheme and to store transparent record of all
achievements made by students.
Introducing smart-incentives
Gamification as a cornerstone of the platform design
Roadmap and a Bold vision for the BitDegree platform:
We practice agile development and therefore carefully plan for the immediate goals and draw general
plans for the future according to the vision that we want to achieve. We share the motto of Jeff Bezos
– “We are stubborn on vision but flexible on details”. We see at least 3 essential stages of platform
development. We have clear plans for v1, however, what will happen in v2 and v3 will depend on the
lessons learned in v1.
We follow core guiding principles for the platform design:
- decentralization,
- transparency,
- inclusion,
- sustainability,
- growth,
- disruption.
We will use these principles when deciding on the strategic direction of the platform and new functionalities.
WHY BITDEGREE IS SUPERIOR TO ITS ALTERNATIVES
There are many well established companies providing remote learning experience like Coursera,
Khan Academy, EdX, CodeCademy, FutureLearn, XuetangX, Udacity and others. These companies
run platforms to provide access to content, assess student knowledge, enable student to mentor
communication. Each company has its take on how to cover its running expenses, for example: by
being supported by consortium of universities, providing paid course or paid assessment, providing
company and product branding. By being pioneers in the new field, those companies burned
through huge amounts of investments to learn about things that does work together and things
that does not fit well. Sadly, after becoming very popular, they become too big to risk introducing
radically new ideas to get funded, introducing new forms of training material, or experimenting with
new communication patterns. The current success of these companies is staggering and allows to
measure the size of market we are about to enter. Top 10 of these companies have in excess of 110
million cumulative registered users with some companies showing revenue in excess of 60M USD.
We are coming late to the market. Coming late to the market allows us to study history and attempts
of each company to test ideas, techniques and to create user centric focused workflows. Being small
allows us to rapidly test new ideas and ways we respond to the needs of our students, sponsors and
contributors. We studied most of well-established remote education providers by enrolling to courses
and learned best practices used but also experienced many difficulties. We analyzed availability and
price of certification, availability of scholarship, value provided to scholarship sponsors and a level of
gamification employed in educational process.
Although gamification techniques are well tested and proven to help motivate the consumers in
other fields it is still seldom used by existing competitors, who stick to more old style, tried and true
academic approaches. We will assemble current best practices of providing free access to teaching
material and augment it with learning process gamification, human mentorship, free and verifiable
assessment, financial incentives to students and employer-student matching capabilities together
not employed by any of our competitors.
We are not a big threat to existing market players as education market is wildly expanding and can
accommodate additional players. Each player brings in exclusive features, which allows to attract
customers but strategic partnerships are common to allow exchange of training material. However,
with time we believe our gamification and incentives based model will show its benefits and lead to
capturing a significant share of remote education market.
The market potential of BitDegree:
It is easy for everyone to observe the rapid expansion of remote education and e-learning market.
We believe that with the new incentivized learning model, the BitDegree brings the next wave of
e-learning adoption, which will spur the growth of the user base. We estimate user base to double
every two years.
TOKEN LAUNCH
BitDegree will issue an ERC20 compatible token, which will be used to provide incentives to students
and contributors of the platform.
The sale of BitDegree tokens will be final and non-refundable. The BitDegree will not be responsible
for any loss of BitDegree tokens or situations making it impossible to access BitDegree tokens, which
may result from any actions or omissions of the user or nay person undertaking to acquire BitDegree
tokens, as well as in case of hacker attacks.
We plan to offer anyone sharing our vision to contribute to the development of BitDegree by buying
BitDegree tokens during the Initial Coin Offering event, which will be held on Q4, 2017. BitDegree goal
is to raise a minimum of 5 million USD and to stop accepting contributions when 25-30 million USD
will be collected. Some of the numbers may change due to ETH/USD exchange rate volatility, but the
following numbers are best estimates as of September, 2017.
• Maximum financing:
75,000 ETH - may change due to exchange rate changes;
• Minimum financing:
16,000 ETH - may change due to exchange rate changes;
• Exchange rate:
1 ETH = 10,000 Bitdegree Tokens - may change with ETH exchange rates;
• Token contract address:
Will be published only on website bitdegree.org 48hrs before the crowdsale launch date;
• Launch date and time:
Date to be announced soon. Block number will be published on website. Dates may be prone to change;
• Token launch time-frame:
30 days.
• Token launch completion:
Token launch will end when either the maximum number of ETH is raised or 30 days have
passed. If less than the minimum of ETHs are raised, ETH can be retrieved by holders of
BitDegree Token;
• Contributors sending ETH to BitDegree Smart Contract address will immediately receive
tokens.
Token Distribution
• BitDegree foundation: 150 million;
• Scholarships pool: 375 million;
• Token available to public at launch: 765 million;
• Team: 150 million; locked for 360 days;
• Bounties / Advisors / Partners: 60 million;
• Tokens in total: 1,5 billion.
People behind BitDegree
The team is comprised of multi-skilled professionals that have worked with each other in various
capacities and became friends. This joins the project that everyone in the team is highly passionate
about. This is the time when everyone dreams big and goes big. Most of the team has already worked
together scaling solutions that reached millions of users and stumbled upon the need to educate
them, whereas some others have worked on the educational initiatives experience, which can be
directly applied to BitDegree.
Andrius Putna, CEO, co-founder
11 years in software engineering. Blockchain advocate. Person behind the success of 000webhost -
world’s first and biggest free cloud hosting platform designed for learning, testing and experimenting.
Hostinger product architect.
Danielius Stasiulis, CBO, co-founder
Head of Startup Division at Civitta (7 years) - the leading management consulting firm in Eastern
Europe. Advised 300+ startups and worked with many startup programs, including Berkeley Skydeck
in Silicon Valley. He focuses on ICO and blockchain-based business models.
Ervinas Rimdeika, CLO, co-founder
Ervinas is a FinTech fan and has extensive practice in related fields of corporate, intellectual property
and business transaction law questions as well. He worked not only at a few well-known law firms,
but also at one of the largest company’s group in Lithuania and Baltic States. In previous years Ervinas
Rimdeika was a member of one of the top raising Baltics FinTech startups and reached impressive
results, where Lithuanian Supreme Court changed case-law and formed new interpretation rules on
financial lease and other matters. Clients and colleagues especially value Ervinas Rimdeika for deep
legal knowledge, critical and strategic thinking, in-depth analysis of the problems as well as rational
approach.
Rio Asatiani, CMO, co-founder
With more than 14 years of experience in effective customer acquisition fields, working with new
brands and startup launches, Rio is a growth-hacking guru & Google Certified Partner who led
000webhost and Hostinger to an international success in more than 40 countries by attracting 29+
millions of new users. He joined the BitDegree project having a strong vision in innovative acquisition
channels and a solid experience in growth-hacking. Rio ensures the success of BitDegree on an
international level.
Darius Rugevičius, Partner in Prime Block Capital Investment Fund
Darius is experienced in building successful technology based business, having sold two of his previous
start-ups in the past 4 years alone. Using his skills to implement effective marketing strategies, propel
execution, and meet deadlines, he has assisted companies operating in the blockchain, fin-tech,
robotics and biotech sectors. In the past year Darius has worked with numerous blockchain projects,
helping them to develop successful strategies, networking and outcome.
Advisors
Jeff Burton, Serial Entrepreneur, co-founder of Electronic Arts
Global technology executive, keynote speaker and a Silicon Valley old-timer. Jeff was a founding
team member of Electronic Arts, where he has overseen the global expansion of its operations. Jeff
has high-level connections in Silicon Valley and around the world that he is using to help startups
like BitDegree. Jeff has developed Berkeley Skydeck startup accelerator and is currently involved in
helping startups around the world to grow and scale into the Silicon Valley. Jeff is a very great guy that
believes in BitDegree and wants to help.
Roberto Santana, Product and Strategy Advisor, Former Senior Manager at Coursera
Entrepreneur and Former Product Management Growth Lead at Coursera. Roberto played a role
in helping Coursera scale to a global level and acquire over 27 million learners worldwide. Roberto
is Stanford MBA with 3 engineering degrees in computer science and design. His exceptional
engineering and technical knowledge has led him to scale several startups by managing the project
and business development, including San Francisco-based Zendesk, where he helped grow number
of paying customers by 60%. Prior to his work in the Valley, Roberto was a Senior Engineer with
Shell, where he led cross-functional team responsible for the delivery of products that accounted for
$400M in refinery revenues.
Maurice De Hond, Steve JobsSchool Founder, Personalized Learning Advisor
A successful entrepreneur and founder of Steve JobsSchool - a modern elementary school concept
designed to see each child as an individual and nurture him based on his strengths and interests.
This learning model quickly became successful and is already adopted in more than 35 schools in
the Netherlands. Being the pioneer of innovative learning ensures the implementation of modern
educational solutions on the Bitdegree platform on the long term that will establish a solid foundation
for IT passionate people to reach their full potential.
James K. Scarborough, Stanford University PhD., Gamification Advisor
Currently a candidate for PhD. at Stanford University, James main focus is to deeply engage players
for the purpose of increasing workplace, classroom, and similar forms of individual and teambased
productivity. He is currently involved in projects assessing the effects of real social interaction
in virtual spaces concerning primarily energy efficiency behaviors, gender and culture specific
responses, and the physiological impact of social interactions in goal-oriented game environments.
Having a profound experience in gamification and working with companies that created such games
as Tetris, Civilization, Falcon Flight Simulator, led him to joining the BitDegree team and assures a
deeply engaging environment of the platform on the long term.
Arnas Stuopelis, COO, co-founder
Arnas is the CEO of Hostinger. Prior to taking the role of the CEO, for 6 years Arnas was responsible
for business development at Hostinger. He successfully expanded Hostinger on a global level as
well as played an important role when creating one of the most successful web hosting brands in
Indonesia - Niagahoster.co.id. With his profound entrepreneurship skills and a solid experience in
business development, Arnas knows how to scale a project to a global success.
Ričardas Pocius, Technical advisor
Ričardas is a passionate distributed systems engineer who enjoys sharing his experience and
knowledge with others. Determined on keeping magic out of the systems. Organiser of Erlang
workshop/meetup in Vilnius,LT.
Bitdegree BDG is a brilliant project i must say, great team, good vision, brilliant advisory board.
Join us today!!!
BitDegree website: https://www.bitdegree.org/
White paper: https://www.bitdegree.org/white-paper...
Announcements: https://t.me/bitdegree
Bitcointalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?top...
Telegram chat: https://t.me/bitdegree
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bitdegree.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitdegree_org