Understanding Open Campus: A Comprehensive Overview

Key Insights

• Open Campus pioneers the tokenization of educational content with its EDU token, allowing content creators to mint courses as NFTs for real monetary value.
• The EDU token has a fixed 1 billion supply. It is the second-largest Binance Launchpad project, generating substantial interest from participants and investors.
• TinyTap, an education startup that integrated with Open Campus, raised $8.5 million in funding from leading VCs, including Sequoia Capital China. It incorporates NFTs into its platform and introduces Publisher NFTs.
• TinyTap has forged strong partnerships with Pinkfong/Babyshark, Care Bears, and Code Green/UNICEF — all while launching new products like TinyTap AI.
• Open Campus and NewCampus launched OC-X, a $10 million accelerator offering resources, post-program support, and funding to educators globally. In addition, TinyTap's $10 million Global Educators Fund incentivizes qualified educators to create content.
• Open Campus’ novel “Publisher NFTs” recently experienced a very positive response, resulting in over a 3x oversubscription. The event emphasized EDU’s utility, as it was used for both onchain revenue sharing and minting of the Publisher NFTs.
• Open Campus continues to expand the OC Alliance, with over 30 companies accepting EDU tokens. To further decentralize the education ecosystem, Open Campus plans to implement Open Campus ID at a large scale and engage in long-term initiatives like Smart Donations for onchain scholarships.

Background

Open Campus is a community-led education platform that directly connects students with educators and content creators. The platform is transforming the future of education by offering a unique foray into the tokenization of educational content. Creators may mint the content as NFTs, allowing teachers and educators to create courses that have real monetary value. EDU, Open Campus’s native token, creates this value by allowing students to purchase courses with the asset.

In short, Open Campus’s mission is “to put the power of learning back in the hands of educators and students.” To achieve this goal, it has fostered an active community of various stakeholders, including educators, learners, content creators, publishers, and parents. These stakeholders can enjoy an efficient marketplace centered around Publisher NFTs. This feature ensures that creators can retain the digital property rights of their content and can generate income proportionate to the content’s success. All in all, Open Campus helps to address inefficiencies in the education world, thanks to crypto’s unique ability to combat rent-seeking behavior and its ability to properly align incentives.

The EDU Token

Source: Open Campus

Open Campus is the result of a shared effort of Animoca Brands, TinyTap, GEM Education, and several other partners. The protocol was catapulted onto the scene early this year with the launch of its EDU token. With its successful release, EDU became the second-largest Binance Launchpad project in history. Over 9 million BNB was committed, and more than 120,000 individuals participated, with the launch being oversubscribed by 1,189x.

EDU has a fixed maximum token supply of 1 billion, the entirety of which was allocated to nine different groups at launch. The asset has several uses throughout the protocol, including payment for courses, fees for minting Publisher NFTs, revenue sharing, and participation in the governance process (e.g., voting on the use of ecosystem funds).

TinyTap

Open Campus has since been adopted by TinyTap, as well as GEMS Education, Pinkfong, Care Bears,  and other partners. TinyTap is an educational startup and a subsidiary of Animoca Brands. It was founded in Tel Aviv in 2012 by Yogev Shelly and Oren Elbaz.

TinyTap offers a code-free platform where professional educators are granted free access to create and share educational games. The created content can be used without charge in the educator’s classroom, and the educators can even earn a profit with TinyTap through subscription revenue. TinyTap also offers a mobile application that has over 10 million users and over 250,000 interactive courses. The beta version of TinyTap’s Prompt-to-Game artificial intelligence service is available to content creators. By entering a single-word prompt, this AI product creates a full TinyTap game, which can then be shared through the Open Campus platform.

TinyTap successfully raised $8.5 million in a funding round that closed on April 25, 2023. The round included major investment firms in the Web3 industry, including Sequoia China, Shima Capital, Polygon, Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital, and GameFi Ventures. The round was completed after TinyTap integrated NFTs into its platform by selling the first 12 Publisher NFTs in Q4 2022. Given TinyTap’s position as a top 10 children's education app globally, the sale generated over 240 ETH (or ~$350,000) and doubled the company’s 2022 revenue compared to 2021.

Open Campus and TinyTap have set forward several future initiatives focused largely on scaling the revolutionary foundation already in place. This includes TinyTap’s ambitious AI roadmap, which saw the release of the Prompt-to-Game in September 2023. This feature grants content creators the power to create dynamic imagery relevant to their educational course. Prompt-to-Text/Image will be followed by “Practice Anywhere” in 2024, an AI service that will produce TinyTap games from any given URL.

Publisher NFTs

Publisher NFTs are a new digital asset class unique to Open Campus. They allow teachers and educators to monetize their knowledge and skills in such a way that they can retain ownership of their work. After a content creator builds an educational course, they can mint it as a Publisher NFT. Then, the NFT is sold to interested buyers (“Co-Publishers”) that promote and sell the course to students. Whenever a student buys a course, both the Publisher NFT holders and the original content creator would receive income.

This course completion feature aligns well with the recently announced Open Campus ID initiative. The solution allows students to store their achievements and credentials onchain in a decentralized manner that are portable across different education providers.

The number of publisher NFTs is expected to reach the thousands to enable myriad users to own the new asset class. Open Campus also aims to have over 1 million holders of Open Campus IDs by 2024 and onboard more than 100 education providers as partners to create the first truly decentralized ecosystem.

In addition, Animoca Brands and TinyTap co-launched a $10 million Global Educators Fund. The capital from this fund is used to incentivize talented educators globally to create high-quality content for all. Individual applicants can be awarded up to $100,00 in EDU tokens to support content creation and marketing. The courses created with this fund are then minted as Publisher NFTs to further expand the Open Campus ecosystem.

Source: Open Campus

Open Campus recently announced the launch of Season 2 for the Publisher NFTs. The new season will distribute a staking bonus of $130,000 USD exclusively to Co-Publishers. Unlike the previous auction in Season 1, the NFTs will be sold as 720 Surprise Packs, with a price range of $465-$550 USD in EDU. Publisher NFT holders can also actively promote their content to increase the game’s popularity and its revenue share.

Season 2 also introduces a staking program, allowing Genesis NFT owners to boost their course revenue by up to 12 times using Golden Backpacks and Silver Notebooks. In doing so, the staking program aims to reward early holders.

Once the program launched on November 27, the Publisher NFTs were minted out in less than three hours. Its popularity was further evidenced by the 3x oversubscription rate for this launch. As with previous iterations, both the mint and the revenue sharing were conducted entirely in EDU.

Partnerships

Aside from offering a novel product, Open Campus has worked hard to establish itself by developing strong partnerships with both Web2 and Web3 entities. Its efforts have resulted in significant success across a wide range of initiatives.

Open Campus, in partnership with NewCampus, launched OC-X, a $10 million accelerator approved by the DAO. The first cohort of educators sponsored by OC-X began on September 22, 2023, and included experts in numerous fields from all over the world, including the United States, Kenya, Singapore, Turkey, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Educators are provided with resources such as a business-to-customer pool of 8,000, six months of post-program support, and $100,000 in non-dilutive funding.

Open Campus continues to add partners to the OC Alliance, a group of more than 30 companies that accept the EDU token as a form of payment for goods and services. These companies ultimately intend for EDU to be the go-to payment method in the Web3 education sector. The OC Alliance consists of numerous leading education providers as well as NewCampus, Atiom, collective, and many more. The partnership with Binance Pay also enables students across the globe to access the educational material offered by Open Campus and its partners with EDU tokens.

Members of the OC Alliance will also offer special benefits to students who own the previously mentioned Open Campus IDs, which are onchain representations of a student’s digital learning records. Each holder receives a unique .edu domain name that records all of the student’s credentials and certifications as well as standard demographic information. Owners of Open Campus IDs can also exercise very granular control over their profiles. They can fully customize their profiles and choose which information to display at any given time — for example, when applying for jobs.

Just recently, Binance’s venture capital arm, Binance Labs, invested $3.15 million in Open Campus. Aside from onboarding more users to Web3, the investment seeks to bring more users to participate in education by way of the newly launched Publisher NFTs.

Further down the line, Open Campus plans to offer Smart Donations. Users will be able to make onchain donations in the form of either scholarships or grants, and institutions and foundations will be able to create scholarship programs to help students on Open Campus pay for courses.

Conclusion

Open Campus showcases a novel approach to education through its unique implementation of content tokenization and strategic partnerships. The integration with TinyTap and household brand names such as Pinkfong/Babyshark, coupled with the introduction of Publisher NFTs, reflects a promising trajectory for the platform. Open Campus has also demonstrated a commitment to expanding the reach of its ecosystem through the OC Alliance. As the platform evolves, Open Campus continues to position itself as a noteworthy player in the intersection of education and blockchain technology.

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