Blockchain Education: Global Impact

Transcript

hey everyone my name is antonio gomez i'm the director of operations at the blockchain education network he's a 501c3 organization based united states it's a non-profit founded all the way back in 2014. today i'll do a brief overview of our operations what we have been up to since the last six years i feel like a dinosaur in this space at this point and yeah let's get started so here's a little bit about ben's history founded in 2014 we're the largest and oldest network of blockchain students professors and alumni around the world initially started by a group of college students at university of michigan mit and stanford that just got together to share their resources like a google drive about bitcoin or about just

anything in space and just at the time people like nobody was talking about the technology so students wanted to get more immersed or just have someone to build on on a project so ben was was founded at mission and we kept growing over the years to more than 200 schools and more than 60 blockchain clubs myself i founded to get a blockchain club at university of florida this was back in 2016 and i remember those were tough years time off the silk road and all a stigma against crypto and we had to convince our school board to allow us to have a bitcoin club and since then more than 15 startups were founded by ben alumni and more than 5 000 students in alumni and our twitter

has grown to 23 plus followers and our newsletter just keeps growing to more than 7 000 subscribers uh here's a bit about our history i'll do a brief rundown so in 2014 we got founded uh most of the organizations that you see here been kept growing we even started a chapter in italy and penn state and georgia tech also the first bitcoin accoutons and there's the mit bitcoin airdrop in october 2014. eric is here in the audience himself he was part of the mitvcon club and in 2015 was a big year for ben that's when we received the tax exemption status from the irs the 501c3 that turns into a non-profit and later that year we also launched the startup

bit quick it was from the students from the ohio state uh in 2016 there's a couple cool events that happen a pretty interesting one for those that are not familiar the tnbc it's an event that happens in miami every year the north american bitcoin conference that was actually where ethereum was first released in 2014 and part of ben's mission and me being a student at florida i always got my free tickets through band because i couldn't afford them and ben was that backbone organization that gave me the support so it was pretty cool because i could get a crypto education through going through conferences and there was a non-profit in the us that enabled me and my other peers to attend these events with the less reduction rates cost

and yeah in 2018 the organization kept growing we did more events and acatons this time we were in the netherlands and we started onboarding students and even playing the conference there and more events happen throughout the year in 2018 we sponsor five students to fly all the way from india and participate at mit akaton and it was actually pretty cool because they owned the akaton on zero knowledge proofs and it just kept growing throughout the year we also do a pre-tech meetups across italy and the chapter initially kept growing and we also started educating students in vietnam and australia in 2019 ben brought students to eat denver at boston mit bitcoin expo and a couple other events throughout the year

in 2020 things start shifting a little bit we got some more interest from companies in the space and then really experience a major period of growth here we started onboarding students in africa and turkey we saw a spike in interest particularly from students in turkey at instability university sabanchi and a bunch of other universities there students wanted to learn more about crypto get an education and it was always really hard because there is no resources available to them on their language so we help them out have access to a network of peers to connect resources and even help them out translating material and in 2021 was a massive pivot year for ben because we're mostly focused in flying students to conferences in-person

events and as you know kovit happened so we had to shift to the digital world and that's when we prepared to release our digital platform called ben learn where students can take any courses about any topics they're interested on and we can also scale not to only a couple thousands but to millions of users so we also receive a couple grants that year we also partner up with blockchain at berkeley to host their blockchain development courses and later that year when things start opening up mostly in the states we sponsor free airbnb and flight tickets for a couple of conferences like the central miami solar breakpoint cosmos verse and a couple others that happened throughout the year and it was pretty cool to see students getting all together and and being back in person to learn about the space and there's really

interesting stories that happened we flew a couple students from turkey to attend cosmos verse in lisbon for example and that was life changing for them because they didn't know what to build on or what protocol they should use if it was cosmos or ethereum and going to these conferences and being in person at these events is life-changing when they go back to their countries and we definitely capture some of those good stories that are on our website you guys can follow up there and ban 22 2022 and above what is our mission the urgency in solution a little bit about our mission we want to create more educational resources basically more courses in different languages in different languages also more workshops around the world provide more free education and scale our our

app and then learn to onboard more users the urgency this is a problem that still plagues the the education industry or the crypto industry is that since crypto was first invented um there is not been many universities adopting courses for credits and the ones who do they charge over that ten thousand dollars to take a masters in crypto or to take just a class so we have seen universities lagging tremendously behind in educating their students about crypto i was fortunate to have a course in my university that was counted towards three credits about blockchain but that was it everything else that i learned was on the side or by attending events that ban would help me out when i was a

student so that was pretty important urgency these are some of the sustainable goals that we touch upon their we're focused is providing quality education gender equality and work in the economic growth and there's another one there it's reduced inequalities uh particularly gender inequality there's something we've seen a lot in developing world me myself going out to turkey and working with students there there's been quite art to balance that in society is a very male oriented society and we've been promoting more gender equality there and that's part of what i'm very passionate about working with ben the urgency around the world as i spoke before turkey africa conversations are very different there than in the

developed world students rely on crypto ethereum stable coins to put their life savings because they don't trust the turkish lira or they don't trust the government so ethereum became actually a way to survive in a sense where they are able to use the stable coin because most of the times the government blocks access to us dollars or they just don't trust other third parties and here's a study by coinbase that about 41 of the top 50 universities have at least one student run club and these clubs usually they they pop in and then they after a couple years they die out and many of these students come to us and they reach out help on setting up a club how can they navigate the administration and get club funding so this is also something we've been

focusing on and helping out and even this last week i got a couple applications of students in india that needed help setting up their club or they needed the educational resources and it just keeps growing students all over the world are more eager to learn and set up their clubs and be leaders and entrepreneurs into space and that's really cool ben's solution we believe the way to combat this is to educate students about technology and empower them to build protocols applications and organizations to their communities and local officials what is ben learn this is our online platform as i mentioned we're actually releasing the mobile app uh by the end of august is where students can learn take any courses on web3 we actually

have some solidity courses that we're offering blockchain fundamentals bitcoin basics really everything is there and we plan on educating 10 million people over the next 10 years it's a pretty bold goal but that's where we focus on here are some of our tangible results i don't know if you guys are familiar with some of these companies auger iota quantum these were all students that we flew into conferences that we got them to be in the same airbnb to come up with an idea or to network or to meet the co-founder and it's pretty cool because some of these students they go on they found these companies become very wealthy and then they want to donate back they want to give back to the company and sort of perpetuate the success so we can see this happening over and over and that's part of what we

believe at band that we should keep doing inspiring students to be founders entrepreneurs and go out there and try connect and create something and here's some of our links you can follow us on twitter blockchain edu we post most of our work there and if you want to learn more about our website is blockchainedu.org if you are up to donate is blockchainedu.org donate and that's pretty much it if you have any questions let me know [Applause] any question for antonio um hi thanks for the great talk i'm

interested to know if you have any plans to add um many more different languages and frameworks for new networks coming out yeah absolutely we really we just partnered up with cello to do a course on cello for example and mostly our devs are canadian or us-based and the courses are in english but there's a tremendous demand to have courses in turkish punjabi or other languages and that's where we see the biggest potential even myself i'm from portugal i speak portuguese and there's no content in portuguese so thank you pardon i meant programming languages driving different blockchains oh yeah yeah absolutely yeah absolutely we're just starting with solidity uh and we got an instructor teaching solidity but we love to have

more other programming languages we think that's the backbone so students can learn those skills and then get jobs in the space so yeah there's another question do you do events um like side events like at devcom will you be doing anything or organizing anything or uh we plan to fly some students there and work with some organizations in the space but we didn't do side events most of our focus was in getting students there getting the free tickets we did that to central miami and we did at most events in florida and we almost need a partnership to defcon but it didn't

happen uh hi uh how do you get funding exactly for students well it's mostly alumni alumni becomes very successful donates they attribute their success to ben it was like hey ben you travel you gave me the possibility to be at this event that's where i got to find about ethereum like me for example i was a student i had no possibility to travel to miami to attend the 1500 conference and ben is like hey free tickets and then we got it together and we also this previous year we've seen something pretty cool happened was large institutions in the space like otc firms brokerages turning

into us and be like hey how can i give back can i do a donation can i help back the community and i thought that was pretty cool for the first time in the seven years of history like seeing large players giving back yeah any more questions thank you [Applause] you