The Future of Ethereum Starts With Open-Source Education | Cy Li

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the feature of ethereum starts with open- Source education my name is Tina I am one of the uth core team members we'll talk a lot more about what uth is but first let me introduce you to some of my colleagues we have satu who is also a u core team member Sai who's our uith Visionary and Colton who is the founder of acctg TCG so to for this session we're going to get started making the case for why open source education then we'll tell you a lot more about our work that we do here at uth as well as the underlying philosophy that we're taking and finally we're excited to unveil a strategic partnership with Colton which he will talk more about so I will get started with the case for open source educ ation um I think the case is quite obvious digital literacy is very crucial in navigating the web 3 space safely when people come and they have to actually own their assets and navigate scams uh there is a widespread need for a blockchain Basics and so while there's a ton of content out there on crypto Twitter on medium substack farcaster users have to really sift through this content and understand um exactly what is quality and what is credible and simultaneously we have numerous numbers of blockchain chapters around the world that are taking this task on of educating and onboarding web 2 to web 3 users but they all have to Spirit access to not only content but also the speakers that they're able to bring in to educate their community and finally we've heard a lot of our chapters have this challenge of upleveling because they have to focus on sort of the operational tasks in basic blockchain education and they don't have the resources to uplo their chapter goals or gain any Global recognition and so we are the University of ethereum U for short our core Mission here is to develop and empower the next generation of blockchain leaders and how we do this is we provide the global community with open access to educational resources that we consider the operational piping for them to focus on more high value things and so let me give you a pretty concrete example um I live in Austin and in Austin there is the University of Texas which hosts a MBA blockchain Club as well as a separate undergraduate Club within Austin there's also a ton of City organizations like at txd and all these clubs whether or not they start for social reasons educational reasons or other reasons all end up having to onboard Web Two to web3 users and so they all have this need for blockchain education so one thing that we're providing for them to lower the burden uh of their focus on blockchain Basics is we provide this online Educational Library for anybody and any of their members to access simultaneously we have this Global Community Hub which they can use to run their chapters um and we provide weekly speaker Le workshops and these speaker Le workshops tap into our networks um which will uh attract generally pretty prominent figures in this blockchain space so for instance I've been a crypt VC most recently a variant and Sai and Sabrina have hosted atcon which is the ethereum Developers conference since 2017 and so a lot of the speakers that we're sourcing these General blockchain chapters do not currently have access to but I think above all the most important thing that we're doing is we're shifting Focus From the operational tasks of providing blockchain education of organizing speaker Le workshops from these chapters and shifting them to more high value things like learn through doing projects and these projects are either projects that they can join when our speakers are coming through and offering contribution opportunities or projects that they may be inspired by our workshops when they see real world use cases of how blockchain is applied um and coming up with their own inspiration and starting their own blockchain projects um and finally I think the biggest part that we offer a lot of these chapters is when they do have a project that matures and want wants to graduate to the broader blockchain Community right now there's no scalable way for them to compete for Global attention and so uh by hosting in real life events such as the um ethereum developers conference we're able to plug in these localized communities and the projects that they're working on directly into the ethereum community and I'll just end on a quick snapshot we've been conceptualized uh to we've uh been around for about two years we have over um a 100 different chapters across a 100 different plus countries and we have a pretty strong offline as well as online footprint so with that said I'll hand it off to my colleague Sabrina who will now talk more about exactly what we do awesome thank you [Music] Tina so I will proceed to um you know touch about and some of the tools will've been built uh for to onboard and Empower Future Leaders so I'll start with our Interactive Learning platform powered by AI if you guys go to u.org or check out the visual references over here you'll be able to find dual lingual style analogy based learning modules covering the fundamentals of the blockchain technology we also have ai tools to assess our students performance by grading their quizzes and facilitate their learning process so with this we really hope to establish the new standard for web three literacy as well as digital literacy in general but this is only phase one for us the next step for us is to invite our partners like such as projects or communities to um you know build through our education infrastructure and build their own education content for their own set of audience this is what we call White labor Solutions and stage three for us is to truly make our platform open source so anyone including communities projects individual educators will be able to contribute their expertise of knowledge to help us co-build co-create this uh interactive version of Wikipedia page of the blockchain space so many of the students after they finished the onboarding series they came to us with the question what's next what else can I learn and how can I really solve you know real world problems through blockchain Technologies that's when we design the weekly interactive workshops for them to you know Advance their learning process so what is our version of Workshop our workshops are led by industry leaders and students are encouraged to brainstorm new Solutions together with the speaker so Tina has been uh working on a few of the workshops with um industry leaders from the Esports gaming industry as well as expert of Creator economy recently she just finished an episode with our guest from stability AI to further explore the synergies between Ai and crypto and our very first Workshop hosted by our Workshop host Rachel was with the vice mayor of city of Berkeley and Princess Sarah of s Leon through this Workshop our students were able to you know explore internship opportunities with the office of city of Berkeley as well as understand how blockchain bonds can be applied to clean water initiatives of s Leon so um through the workshop series students can get to understand what's beyond aspirational potentials and really brainstorm and try to build projects with their peers what we can offer for students who want to build their projects is a serious support through our Global Community hubs so um if students you know teamed up with their peer that they met through our platform or previously through local communities or university blockchain clubs they can submit their projects and we will be able to provide mentorship support grants opportunities as well as you know exposure at our own events so to recap the learn by doing Journey starts with learn the basics at at u.org and then if you want to learn more advanced topics and understand how you know you can apply blockchain technology to solve real world problems you can join our workshops and then you can team up with with your peer and work on projects later you you'll get the opportunity to present at Regional and Global events that's hosted by us so I've touched upon touched on Solutions how can students get involved and and how can we support them I'll now pass the mic to SAI to introduce uh you know uh explain more about our ethos our Phil philosophy and what is the fundamental layer of uth welcome thank you satu thank you Tina oh all right uh let's not over complicate things uh ethos or fundamentals um let's let's talk about what we can identify that's currently going on in the space uh the negative constructs the negative narratives the negative connotations um how the space has became has become a financial vehicle for Deens we have a lot of Education initiatives that covers learn and earn earn and learn um type of programs where they are incentivized through monetization and I believe that's the worst way to educate or to start any educational uh initiative so personally I believe what you put in is what you get out and if we want to create uh and inject creativity we have to inject it uh with with creativity uh to carry the values of what open source is uh you transparency inclusivity Community Building sharing of resources and knowledge learn by doing and being accessible so going along The Narrative of a financial vehicle um I believe that people come into this industry for the wrong reasons uh they don't stick around long enough for there to be social awareness or social responsibility we want to form a fundamental layer that give our students and our members the tools the right tools uh for them to have both the tangible and the intangibles in order to build regenerative pipelines raising the Benchmark of digital literacy um part of making content as accessible as possible is to make it fun and as relatable as possible Sabrina touched on how we use AI tools um that concept is based on definement technique where you essentially is you don't know something well enough unless you can say it in your own words uh we wanted to create a standardized curriculum where anyone from 5year old to 50-year old is able to understand it um so we took about 100 and 60 or so Core Concepts to the ethereum blockchain and created story lines uh taught through analogy and we wanted to Showcase a new way to educate uh by localized content meaning by no means are are we Educators but we want to provide um a different approach to how things can be taught and how things can be learned and most people when they when we ask um are you interested in blockchain or what are what is what do you think about web 3 is a lot of times we get that it's not that we don't care or we're not interested it's we don't have we don't know where to start um so at the University of ethereum we want to consolidate the resources that we have collected we want to we want to be able to extend our hands out to anyone who needs and wants to get started in this space another thing that we're doing is these weekly workshops uh which is essentially spotlighting everyone who's building blockchain uh and using blotching tools to uh make impact in their in their Community uh we want to showcase what they're doing around the world so our students can begin to know what's possible and how how they can begin to make impact regardless of scale regardless of Industry we want to create this fundamental layer that instills moral fiber where it's a safe environment where you're able to fail you're able to try um and you're able to have access to Dedicated mentorship so you have the tools and the confidence to be able to succeed in one of the use cases that we believe can help build a more positive narrative in the creative Collective space is Ace and next I want to invite Colton to come up and share what he's working on amazing thank you Sai hello so I'm Colton I'm the founder of Ace Ace is a trading card game about the magic of web 3 so every card in Ace represents real world Innovations and the heroes and villains behind them so picture all of your favorite crypto themes memes the protocols people and projects and then transform those into sci-fi and Epic Fantasy cards so we think of this as metaverse mythology and the coolest part is that these cards are actually created by by the community by people like you before I get to that though how did we just go or why did we go from talking about education to now talking about a game well as my colleague just talked about digital literacy is lacking overall and the blockchain space in particular is extremely complicated there's a lot to wrap your head around it's a super fast moving space um and especially if you're just getting into it it's just easy to get scammed and totally overwhelmed so you've all know Harari has this quote that I absolutely love um says humans think in stories and we try to make sense of the World by telling stories and Ace presents a story uh that uses these five different colors each color representing a different philosophy in the crypto space and these create a sort of mental model and what I really wanted to go after here was is creating the most fun and engaging way possible possible to learn about the blockchain space without feeling like you're learning anything at all so let's dive into a couple of these we'll start with the good old Deens the re the the red cards so anybody who's played uh trading card games before you be used to like more aggressive aggro style decks these are going to be your dgen red cards so these are your very chaotic sort of uh uh just immediate action and and like just you're going to be really strong at the beginning of the game but maybe taper off late game across from Red you've got the region maybe not so strong at the beginning of the game but super powerful late game a lot of the cards will represent uh maybe names that aren't so popular in the crypto space but they're all the people in projects that have been around for years doing really really great work in Gold we've got a lot of your more traditional institutions the banks the centralized exchanges uh some of the government institutions um these often are represented by more sci-fi and sort of um very futuristic uh Technologies and across from them you have the real magic blue focused on freedom Innovation a lot of the cards here will represent the actual uh web 3 and crypto things you'll see around a place like eth Denver finally you have the black category the shadow these are all of the other philosophies taken to an extreme um the corrupt versions of each of them and uh while a lot of these are really fun and flavorful cards they can be uh uh quite sad if you lived through some of these moments so here we have some of the contagion the Frog commanders the dark personalities and of course anyone who's familiar with slate star codex and the demon of coordination failure we've got molok right on top so as I mentioned many of the most uh popular cards in the alpha edition of Ace were created by the community and one of the things that I'm really really excited about right now is that uh huge thank you to Jil for coding this up uh we now have a very early version of the web app for you to actually make your own card s so until now I've been a bottleneck in this process where I just meet with small groups of people we do some creativity games we vote on different cards um it's worked great but now it's a much more permissionless process so you can join the Discord you can jump right in and like I said to to capture the incredible vibrant diversity of crypto the only way we can do that is by everyone adding their own perspectives uh and just as an artist and a creator it's one of the most thrilling things to see is how all of our perspectives weave together so I certainly invite you to uh drop some cards in and really excited to see what you come up with that's powered by by Eden really really cool Tech so the last part here that I'm going to touch on is just uh where where this project came from and where we're going so one year ago I came to eth Denver with an art project there was no game at the time it's called the the infinite Garden cards and it was 20 of these collectible cards um I handed those out and after e Denver over the following 12 months my brother and I created the entire trading card game we sold out at Dev connect in Istanbul and now we're partnering with the University of ethereum to bring you the digital version I'm really excited about this transition into the digital space because it is going to just make this so much more accessible to people and as an educational resource uh that's something that's just really really important to me um so both in terms of the educational element and this sort of idea of of like learning by doing um these are two themes that we share uh between uith and and Ace and uh again I invite you to join this adventure and I'm really excited excited to just see the game that we can create together so thank you very much that's back to you yeah thanks Colton um I know you'll be um you'll be in the main event you'll have a booth set up there so he'll be selling more of his soldout cards that he's reserved for eth Denver uh so you can grab a deck and play the game um so that was the end of our talk I'm just going to conclude on a few points um here's all of our socials but the one thing I want to say is we're constantly looking for uh ethereum leaders to feature in our Workshop so if you have an interest in giving back to the community talking more about what you're doing with blockchain feel free to email us lead you.org and we can get a conversation set up to see if it could be a fit um we are also interested in uh creating a mentorship network so feel free to email us if you have any interest in mentoring any of the projects that come out of U eth and finally for eth Denver we have a few cool things uh we have a booth set up at the entrance of this Arena so come find us um we are participants in a poop challenge um where you can um mint your poop and then uh start your uth trivia but I think the other cool things is if you wanted to try out our online online uh Workshop or our online uh modules on blockchain Basics um if you finish the beginner course which is about an hour um come find us at our booth and we'll enter your name into a raffle for one of 10 signed vitalic t-shirts that we will raffle off at the end of e Denver and then two if you finish our intermediate course um which will take you know two three hours um come find us and we'll give you a compt ticket to edcon which is taking place um in July end of July in Tokyo this year so come find us and that was our talk