3. Current examples of L2G

If we were to compare traditional finance and DeFi, we would end up with basically opposing UX. What people do in DeFi in no way resembles what they do in traditional finance. Transacting, investing, seeking financial advice, depositing and withdrawing: DeFi makes each of these and every other financial activity completely different. The same doesn’t fully hold for education as there are a number of processes we simply can’t do without: pre-testing, designing the learning environment, testing, consolidating, etc. Therefore, these processes and procedures which regularly take place in physical schools will have to find their place within digital eduverses as well, though we might finally be able to do without roll calls.

Bearing this in mind, in this paper I will focus on some of the most interesting examples of L2G currently available:
• Bankless Academy
• Salad.academy
• Legion Network
• Rabbithole.gg
• EarnCarrot

I will base my analysis of these solutions on three criteria:
• Content - assessed for depth (how appropriate the level of education) & extent (how broad the education)
• Presentation - assessed for ease (how the presentation method -slides, videos, articles, etc.- helps/hinders users’ learning) and boost (how the presentation method increases/decreases users’ learning)
• UE (User Experience) - assessed for credibility (how trustworthy and authoritative the education provider is to the user) and rewards (how the educational challenge is balanced with incentives)

**Disclaimer: the projects analyzed span over many aspects of the Behemoth that crypto is quickly becoming as an industry. If you believe that I have left out any major L2G projects and platforms, please find my contacts at the bottom of this paper and just get in touch. Please, bear in mind that the focus here is the educational process and design rather than the specific content provided.
Additionally, some of these platforms are in an evidently embryonic stage. In my assessment, I will not consider future possible iterations of the platforms themselves or the content they provide because my interest is to analyze what works and what doesn’t at present. I wish each and every one of these projects the greatest success they can achieve as any educational effort in crypto and web3 is to be commended. Nobody should feel under scrutiny as I am simply an education expert trying to bridge consolidates educational models to these new, greener pastures and develop a model that simply does not exist yet.

Bankless Academy

Bankless Academy is one of BanklessDAO’s latest productions, yet another effort by bDAO to place themselves as the Publishing House of Web3.

Assessment:
• Content:
All the content available is freely accessible and very thorough. It is however, very finance-centred at a time when we know that a lot of newcomers to this space are being attracted by aspects of crypto that are of completely different nature: social life, arts, entertainment, etc. Broadening the scope would be very beneficial to the users of the Bankless Academy.
• Presentation:
This is where bA shines the least with content that is never easy on the eye.
• UE:
The testing design (1 notion is presented and it is then tested with a question) slows down education and distracts from the learning. This design also passes the message that acquiring notions is the endgame, rather than expanding the ground for learning and make sure to digest the incredible amount of knowledge one has to be familiar with in crypto. Finally, POAP rewards are great, though you might struggle to actually get a code to mint one (I couldn’t!).

Salad.academy

Salad.academy by Salad Ventures is gearing up to provide education to P2E scholars and gamers. This is possibly part of a multi-pronged move into the market with the main aim of launching an OS for gamefi and P2E.

Assessment:
• Content:
The platform has a clear and stated focus on P2E, which renders the question of content selection even more relevant. Who picks the games? Is the selection the direct result of partnerships? If so, should that be disclosed? Moving past the issue of content selection, I noticed that the few courses currently available (Axie, Crabada, Happy Land, Mines of Dalarnia) seem to be completely oblivious to the necessary steps required before one is actually playing a blockchain game (wallet setup, account creation, game basics, etc.). This might be fine for users (mostly intermediate to advanced) who are already interested in a specific game and are looking for that type of content. There’s the risk that Web2 platforms will be much better geared to provide that type of education (YouTube tutorials and walkthroughs), an outcome I think we can all agree would be better avoided. How that can be achieved is a longer conversation we will have some other time.
• Presentation:
More effort might be needed here. The content feels in a draft stage, with visuals often added from snapshots of videos.
• UE:
This platform offers probably the best solutions in terms of testing: timed quizzes with randomized questions and numbered attempts? Great! Instant results with good analytics of test performance? Even better! A very thorough testing system that feels a bit like an online test? Well, in this sense it might overburden some learners with overly packed quizzes.

Extra note:

The available courses on the platform are labeled as FREE. I can’t but fear that users might be charged for future courses, which would be a very questionable choice for Salad.academy. Additionally, although Salad.academy is supposed to represent a significant effort towards standardizing education in P2E, the ‘feel’ of the platform is rather haphazard.

The Legion Network

This app by LGX Network aims to expand the ecosystem of blockchains by offering a number of features. Their ambitious road map includes Bluemoon (a collaborative NFT Marketplace) and Bizpad (business applications). The app currently features a number of mobile games users can play (Arcadia section) and an educational tab called Empower. Within it, there are currently two courses: one is self-aimed, to learn more about the app itself; the other is a rather interesting course on Blockchain which will be the main focus of this analysis.

Assessment:
• Content:
Leaving aside the very limited selection of content currently available, one can’t help but question the curation of the content and whether it was given the best placement.
At present, the entire app is split between very light gaming and rather heavy, over-insightful education. In a way, it’s like going to a theme park to watch a college lecture.
• Presentation:
The videos are very well-animated but cannot be scrolled forwards or backwards,
only paused.
• UE:
The platform is relatively easy to use but that’s about it in terms of experience. There is no testing and the rewards users get are in the native LGX token, which is not even claimable yet. Apart from these limitations, the credibility of the app as an educational destination relies solely on the quality of the videos presented.

Extra note:

Apart from the way the content is presented, this app deserves a mention because it is a mobile app, the first to try to add some education to its offer, albeit in a little confusing way.

rabbithole.gg

Rabbithole ticks very few of the educational boxes we are considering in this analysis since the website cannot be fully defined as an education provider. It feels more like the Achievement section of Web3, a hub to redirect people towards places where they can hone specific crypto-related skills and get rewarded with experience points once they prove they have acquired a skill. These unlock quests but at present I cannot say if the quests open up real rewards rather than more experience points.
The Rabbithole family comprises rabbitholemedia.gg, without doubt a valuable source of education for mostly intermediate users in the form of articles and podcasts neatly categorized into macro-areas. One has to question why this abundance of content is not in any way connected to rabbithole.gg. The lack of synergy screams of missed opportunity: what if Rabbitholemedia provided content for all level of usage, and using such content also earned users exp. points on Rabbithole?
I will limit the present analysis to whatever content is available on rabbithole.gg but I will also bear in mind the importance of synergy between systems and platforms to boost education in my final recommendations.

Assessment:
• Content:
Mostly decentralized protocols and projects, with occasional tutorials provided. These tutorials are very thorough but they do not cover the entire suite of apps and projects showcased. Additionally, the skills users are incentivized to develop are ideal for pre-intermediate users and above. In this sense, the onboarding potential of the platform is somehow diminished (and one could argue that intermediate users might already be familiar with PoolTogether or Compound).
On a secondary note, it is hard not to notice that Ethereum- and Avalanche-related projects feature more than any other blockchain. In addition, for a website that advertises itself as ‘Your guide through web3’, it strikes me as particularly odd that none of the currently available destinations for decentralized social media and fan economy (The Hive blog, Sound, Bastyon, etc.) are even mentioned. Once again, we must address the issue of what’s selected as useful content and the project tab feels a bit like a glorified shill-zone.
• Presentation:
The destinations are displayed nicely, and the tutorials are easy to follow with plenty of opportunity for expansion.
• UE:
The user’s pre-existing level of knowledge in all crypto and Web3 things makes a big difference here. Rabbithole is nicely positioned to help pre-intermediate and lower-intermediate users develop skills they are already interested in and do so relying on the most trustworthy decentralized options. I will objectively stick to my assessment criteria: credibility and rewards. Here, Rabbithole falls short of standards. First of all, there is no testing system: users are supposed to learn how to do something and then carry it out. Completing the operation is the test itself, which is a clever solution, though possibly not recommendable. To begin with, I was not able to claim any experience points even though I went through some of the skills. Technical issues aside, I believe this system to greatly limit what an education provider can do with testing. This model (i.e., teach one skill > learn one skill > practise one skill) is impossible to scale when a crypto syllabus is based on dozens of skills and hundreds of sub-skills, and the number grows on a daily basis.
Speaking of rewards, I’m afraid Rabbithole fares even worse. If the idea is that of building a digital curriculum that is easily spendable in Web3, one must wonder how much it would cost to put that together if each course offers NFTs mintable for hundreds of dollars in ETH. I am afraid the current number of holders of these assets (usually in the single digits, if not exclusively the issuer) is evidence of poor reward mechanisms design.

Extra note:

Rabbit Hole focuses on decentralization and non-custodial solutions. In theory, this is commendable as it reflects more closely what’s considered to be the shared crypto ethos. However, I believe the assumption has been made here that newcomers would benefit from decentralized solutions whereas it is possibly easier to argue the exact opposite: onboarding to centralized institutions (Binance or other crypto banks) might indeed be preferable as most
people would be coming from a traditional bank, which resembles a centralized exchange much more closely that it does a decentralized financial ecosystem. This is a foundational point to which I will repeatedly return later. For now, it suffices to say that the platform is a clear case of what happens when necessary steps in the educational/onboarding process are overlooked. Despite this, I see a lot of potential for rabbithole.gg as a tool for advancement once a user has reached intermediate level.

EarnCarrot

Carrot is an app that functions as a reward system for readers of bitcoinmagazine.com. The app features an article feed that rewards users every time they read content (5 BTC satoshis per article) and a QR code reader. Carrot codes are distributed on social media by brands and creators for community events and similar. This could be a model for education and content providers to ‘outsource’ rewards for their users to a separate app.

Assessment:
• Content:
Apart from wondering whether the app itself would be generally more interesting to use if it featured articles from more than a single publication, Carrot codes can be linked to any kind of activity performed online, educational as well as social, or even both at the same time. Most of the articles from bitcoinmagazine.com are aimed at advanced audiences, but there is a 21-day course which introduces Bitcoin and blockchain transactions in layman terms. It’s easy to imagine a model in which education providers offer Edu codes linked to basic or more advanced educational activities (learn to set up your crypto wallet > perform the task > get a code) that their learners can redeem on a separate app.
• Presentation:
The app is very basic but intuitive.
• UE:
The content in the articles themselves is not tested in any way, and understandably so as it’s supposed to be informative rather than educational. The 21-day course includes a quiz that users who want to be rewarded in satoshis must pass. The low withdraw limit from Carrot means that the app is an effective way for people to get in touch with the world of Bitcoin, learn about it, earn some of it and move it somewhere else, possibly to put it to use in the ways they learned in the previous steps. It is a very direct, flexible and simple solution and I can only wonder what the applications could be if users could get codes that rewarded them with currencies other than BTC or, why not, non-fungible tokens!