[RFC] Bankless Academy: Lending and borrowing lesson ft. Euler.finance

jengajojo · January 10, 2023, 7:24pm

author: @jengajojo
editors: @tetranome, @didierkrux
Squad: DAOstewards

Summary:

Bankless Academy is a free-to-access education platform on a mission to provide the information and tools necessary to achieve financial self-sovereignty - with going Bankless. We would like to build a lesson on ‘Lending and Borrowing’, customised for onboarding users to Euler.finance as the lesson’s on-chain quest. We would like to ask the Euler DAO for 40,000 USDC upfront to build and deliver this lesson.

Usage metrics: Boards - Mixpanel | Product Analytics

Available courses: Lessons | Bankless Academy

Specification:

Euler finance is one the most innovative DeFi protocols, which has seen a steady organic uptick in users with over 6200 users interacting with the platform, source: warden_finance, dune dashboard. Most of these users are crypto natives who already know about DeFi and can interact on-chain with the protocol. Expanding Euler’s reach to new users would require capturing the attention of those from the tradFi lending-borrowing business.

We believe that the primary bottleneck for onboarding users to DeFi in Education is that users generally have difficulty understanding the basic concepts even though they are an analogy to conventional systems. Realising this bottleneck, BanklessDAO has launched BanklessAcademy to educate new joiners about different aspects of DeFi and incentivise them to use DeFi apps with easy UI.

After building our 7 intro lessons and a lesson on DEX Aggregators, we want to introduce our users to the concept of lending and borrowing. The lesson aims tol cover topics such as:

Defi vs. Tradfi lending/borrowing
Earning interest on crypto assets
Managing risk, liquidations
Flash loans
Benefits of borrowing against crypto (taxable event avoidance, maintain price exposure)

The lesson will end with a call to action for users to make a basic deposit on Euler.finance to claim the lesson completion badge on the Academy platform.

How will this help the Euler ecosystem grow?

Through education, direct onboarding quests, proof of personhood, user research and marketing within the Bankless ecosystem, Bankless Academy can drive many active, equipped, legitimate users to use Euler.finance - and even begin taking part in Euler governance.

Marketing + Brand Association:

Throughout lesson production, the Euler ecosystem will benefit from:

Multiple build announcements via Bankless Academy communication channels.
Multiple tweets via @BanklessDAO to its ~61,000 followers.
A BanklessDAO newsletter feature - 18,800 regular subscribers, averaging 13,000 views.
Multiple announcements in BanklessDAO community calls.
OPTIONAL: Twitterspace + AMA with members of the Euler team, talking specifically about Euler as a lending-borrowing solution.

What is the timeline and expected date of lesson delivery?

Through the beginning of production to the launch campaign, we estimate a two month delivery period from the time funds are received.

Project and Team Background:

The Academy Squad was born out of BanklessDAO and has been working on the Bankless Academy app for over a year now. Our team is composed of a trained game designer, an experienced developer, a marketing/community manager, and two content production specialists.

Since inception, our team has attended a number of international conferences and formed awesome partnerships with some of the most bankless-to-the-bone protocols/projects (including 1inch & Optimism) in the Ethereum space. We love what we do and believe we’ve found our Ikigai.

How many users does Bankless Academy have?

Monthly lesson completions:

450+

Monthly active users:

1200+

Total unique wallet addresses connected:

9000+

Total lesson completions:

16,400+

Project links:

Website: https://app.banklessacademy.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BanklessAcademy

Discord/Discourse/Community: Discord

Team member info:

Tetranome - Project Champion & Design Lead
https://twitter.com/Tetranome

DidierKrux - Dev Lead
https://twitter.com/didierkrux

iSpeakNerd - Content Lead
https://twitter.com/iSpeak_Nerd

OrnellaWeb3 - Community Manager
https://twitter.com/OrnellaWeb3

HiroKennelley - Writing Lead
https://twitter.com/HiroKennelly

river0x · January 10, 2023, 7:43pm

Hey jengajojo! Thanks for this proposal. It’s interesting. Can you clarify the 450+ monthly lesson completions? Is it the number of people connecting their wallet to finish the class or the number of people opening the webpage? Thank you.

Raslambek · January 10, 2023, 9:33pm

Hi @jengajojo ! Education is very important part for onboarding new users to Defi! While I cannot but support your initiative, I still have some questions.

How long will lessons take? I see from the examples on the Academy website that one lesson lasts form 5-15 minutes , so the overall corse time would be around 10*5= 50 minutes, is it correct?
I just passed your joint lesson with 1Inch. Did u receive a grant for doing that from 1inch as well?
When passing lessons, will “students” have access to some kind of chat or something like this to ask u questions if they do not understand something?
The lesson will end with a call to action for users to make a basic deposit on Euler.finance to claim the lesson completion badge on the Academy platform. Does it concern the whole course or each lesson? I mean will users need to interact with Euler 1 or 5 times? How do u plan to encourage them to spend assets for deposits+fees?
Could u please specify how the requested compensation is going to be used (salary, servers maintanance, third party providers services, etc)?

didierkrux · January 10, 2023, 11:28pm

Hi @river0x,
I’m the Bankless Academy Dev lead.

I can help clarify what lesson completions means in more details: it includes reading the lesson, answering the quizzes correctly, connecting your wallet and completing the lesson quest.
A lesson quest is an practical action to learn by doing.
The lesson quest on our DEX Aggregator’s lesson sponsored by 1inch is to do a swap on 1inch using the Polygon network (cheap fees, so a great way to test a platform).

Our lesson completion stats have been growing lately. We had 545 completions in November and 654 in December.

jengajojo · January 11, 2023, 6:52am

Thank you for expressing support @Raslambek . Here are some answers:

We try to cap our lesson timing to 15-20 minutes to motivate Explorers to do a full lesson in one go. Our approach is very similar to DuoLingo (the language learning app). We have 2 more lessons in the pipes, an L2 lesson sponsored by Optimism + a going Bankless Lesson.
Yes, 1inch also sponsored the DEX Aggregator’s lesson (same proposal). Same for Optimism.
We encourage our user ask questions on our gm.xyz community page and after a new lesson release we collect feedback to have check that the content and the quests are clear. We didn’t have to many questions up until now and our feedback have been very positive (people reporting that the content is clear).
You can expect a quest requiring 1 onchain interaction at the end of lesson. The goal is to onboard the user on the platform and track the transaction. We can discuss what this onchain action can be, but ideally it should be quick to do (around 5 minutes).
The requested compensation is going to be used to create the content, develop and maintain the quest and for marketing. The goal is to cover overall project costs (salaries & infrastructure).

Raslambek · January 12, 2023, 8:06pm

Thanks u @jengajojo for the detailed explanation. While I reiterate my support to the educational dimension, I have doubts that 40k is a fair price.

knightsemplar · January 13, 2023, 4:10pm

Hey guys, thanks for the post. I’m a fan of Bankless and how you guys are working hard to push the space forward.

However, at this stage, I’m not sure this is what we need. The new UI hasn’t launched yet and I feel there needs to be some time for it to normalise (bugs and tweaks). On top of this, there are more new features coming to the dAPP (EulerSwap, baby Euler etc).

Basically, these lessons could be outdated very quickly.

patria · January 14, 2023, 1:32am

how much is the grant from 1inch?

Tetranome · January 14, 2023, 3:50pm

Hi @Raslambek, thanks for your comment. I’m the Design Lead & Project Champion @ Bankless Academy. I’d like to share a breakdown of the project areas this grant would be allocated to so that you can better understand our price point.

We use these funds to compensate the following:

User research, Level-Up Live session + compensation for the external subject matter expert.
Multiple content writing passes + feedback rounds
Illustration conception and production + feedback rounds
Launch campaign and additional marketing
Quest development + post-release maintenance
Lesson statistic development + maintenance
Website infrastructure/software costs (hosting, database costs)
Sponsorship relations + commission for any liaison
Lesson translation + maintenance (coming Summer 2023)
Maintenance of website infrastructure and website features like Gitcoin Passport, Academy Badges, Mobile app, UI/UX updates, translations etc.

With these areas in mind, I’d like to share more on our vision as to how Bankless Academy isn’t just a library of subject-specific lesson content. What we’ve built - and are building on - is an interactive, web3-interoperable user journey that guides the crypto-curious from wallet setup through to becoming confident Defi/NFT explorers.
If you take a look through our content, each lesson builds on the user competency of the last - whether that’s seen in the concepts introduced, the on-chain quest assigned, or even on-site meta-skills - like Gitcoin Passport setup or our upcoming wallet notifications. We put research-backed attention towards the different personality types we see in the crypto space, and make sure that each lesson gives a sufficient understanding of the diversity of angles people approach this space. This is even more apparent in our upcoming ‘Going Bankless’ lesson series - where we focus on ‘why?’ rather than ‘how?’.

Our program is equipping Bankless Explorers with the competency, confidence, proof-of-personhood (Gitcoin Passport), on-chain proof-of-knowledge (Badges) necessary to navigate and settle in the budding areas of this space that need capable, real citizens. We aim to embed ourselves as the defacto education public good on Ethereum - a community that offers a free, quality education built with trusted partners of the Bankless ecosystem (including curation by Bankless hall-of-fame guests!) Our focus on free access to information also gives us the upside of maximising user traffic.

To get an idea of how our recent Passport/Badge rollout has been performing since launch, check out Academy Badges - on Dune Analytics.

Badge issuance means the user has finished the lesson, completed the on-chain quest, and minted the proof-of-knowledge credential to their wallet.
I’d also like to draw attention to this data being gathered during bear market conditions. Brand & platform placement in the Academy user journey will be drastically more valuable during a bull market - at no additional cost.

By partnering with us, Euler’s name and product would be the first lending & borrowing experience these users have in the space. Interacting with your product becomes part of our user journey, and at the same time, Euler becomes one of the first communities these citizens have the opportunity to join.

@knightsemplar Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I hope the above reply has helped to give more context about our product offering and collaboration outreach. To clarify, Academy lessons are very focused on underlying concepts and mechanics. It is only the on-chain quest that is context-dependent (i.e Euler). This makes our lessons more evergreen than a traditional platform walkthrough, because the Academy user understands details beyond just user interface layout. Euler can launch a new UI and all we have to do is re-record our optional quest walkthrough - which is included in this grant package.

Suppose Euler releases new features in the future that move beyond basic lending & borrowing concepts. In that case, we can even consider building more Academy content later in the user journey to have explorers revisit the Euler platform to complete further on-chain actions.

I encourage you to read through Optimism’s Tooling Committee analysis of our Optimism grant request if you have further interest:

Let me know if you have more interest on this front, happy to discuss further!

Hi @patria - last July we received our 1inch grant valued @ $20k USD. Since then, we raised our price to more accurately account for the long-term upkeep of content and the on-chain quest. Our grant request @ Optimism in September was valued @ $33k USD. Since this grant, we have balanced our ask with our actual coordination/production/evergreen upkeep costs, as well as increasing our product offering with additional user journey research, sponsor tools like our stats dashboard, quality assurance (industry expert reviews etc.) and upcoming feature support like translations. We expect this last one to be a massive multiplier on our market opportunity & lesson impact.

TinkaB · January 16, 2023, 9:48pm

In my opinion $40,000 is an insane amount of money for what is being offered here.

It seems as though you are cloaking the real offer, the marketing and brand association, within this idea that Euler would be paying to “build and deliver” this lesson. It’s ok to ask for money for the marketing and brand association, but it feels shady for it to be sold this way.

Realistically, if it was about education - Euler could hire a top quality teacher for an entire year working full time for about $40,000. In a market like this it feels unfair to charge such a high fee to a growing protocol like Euler.

On the marketing and brand association, quest completion and award collection seem extremely low. And in my opinion this isn’t really a good use of the DAOs treasury - especially as Euler is growing healthily currently.

I appreciate the project broadly - but ultimately would vote no to this proposal unless there was a substantial drop in price.

Tetranome · January 17, 2023, 12:22pm

Hi @TinkaB, I’m going to try to clear up what seems to be a misunderstanding of our business model, as being deceptive towards our partners is in no way our intention.

Our goal is to provide an engaging, blockchain-interoperable, ungated crypto-education to as many people across the world as possible. We focus on providing free access to (and developing features that scale access for) our users, choosing to instead work with sponsors to exchange public goods funding for product education, traffic, and community inflow. We’re very much an education-first initiative - I can’t begin to explain how important that is to us, haha.

In terms of site activity, our bear market traffic might not rival that of top education platforms in the space, but with Gitcoin Passport we’re able to mitigate the scalability of sybil attacks and put a higher guarantee on the legitimacy of Academy badge holders. I’d also mention our decision to avoid financial incentives for lesson completion as this builds a user base that will not stick around when the incentives dry up.
Our traffic statistics show a consistent and growing community of regular Academy users, incentivised by curiosity, community, and Bankless brand trust. As we continue to consolidate our organic base of users and sponsors, we will begin looking at growth options like paid advertising that can help us scale impact.

While I agree with the teacher salary comparison in terms of figure - the scalability, brand awareness, and overall value produced by our platform make for an inconclusive comparison. Would the teacher also be preparing material, marketing the lessons, handling admin etc.? On the other hand, Academy content lasts longer than the one year teacher salary and is kept evergreen by our maintenance.

The $40,000 grant request sits at this level because it allows us to develop and maintain the sponsor lesson while continuing to scale our education, platform and community. The incentive alignment here helps provide more value to the user, to existing sponsors, and the platform at large.
This grant request is less of a product sale, and more of an offer to fund, join and benefit from a growing community that is scaling web3 education - all backed by a successful brand, and a team that ships.

Tetranome · January 17, 2023, 12:26pm

@TinkaB I also just want to clarify that Bankless Academy is handling the entirety of content production, with optional input from Euler throughout - not the other way around. It seems this might be the base of the misunderstanding?

patria · January 18, 2023, 10:13am

I’d personally feel the cost is quite high compared to what will be offered. I also don’t believe euler will be used by newcomers in crypto space hence no fit for current user demographic.

euler_mab · January 18, 2023, 2:32pm

On thing to say about this is that there’s a v2 of the UI being developed by the Euler Labs team right now. @wojtek has been sharing some sneak peaks from time to time. It’s not a million miles away now. Maybe it would be better, if people want to do the Bankless Academy, to do it using the new friendlier and cleaner UI?

allthecolors · January 19, 2023, 5:59am

I’m late to the party but need to push back at this idea that Euler could hire a top quality teacher for an entire year for $40k and get what’s proposed here. First of all, let’s stop systemically undervaluing educators and education; in a high-cost-of-living area, that kind of pay may fly because of broken public financing of education systems, but that doesn’t mean we have to reproduce that broken model here. Second, even the most talented educator (all of whom have to wear many hats to do their job well) won’t be as effective at producing and distributing this lesson as the team proposed here.

@Tetranome it might help provide further context for the amount requested if you could discuss:

How long you anticipate Bankless would continue to maintain the lessons (presumably it can’t be indefinite despite the “evergreen” descriptor, so a rough idea of annual infra and labor costs there could be helpful)
How Bankless has managed the previous grants of this type that you cited; presumably the tokens weren’t all market dumped, but if you have a policy in place for how you balance meeting expenses with incentive alignment with the protocols you work with, that would be nice to know about.

Tetranome · January 22, 2023, 5:01pm

Hi @allthecolors, appreciate the thoughts and questions.

Lesson Upkeep
We sat down this week to discuss terms and a length for lesson upkeep. What we would like to suggest for lesson builds is a 2yr term with brand association and quest/content upkeep, after which we can discuss a second sponsorship period and grant model, or seek a new sponsor.
Because this introduces both less long-term maintenance and less value, we’d like to reduce the grant request to $35,000.

Here is our allotted infrastructure + labour cost breakdown for one year:

Content edits: $1000
Quest dev + video maintenance: $1000
Website infrastructure/software (hosting, db, stats) + upkeep: $500
Statistic monitoring + upkeep: $500

This puts our total cost @ $6000 for 2yrs of maintenance, to which we would then add the value of the sponsor placement.

Incentive Alignment
For spending of grant funds, our policy has been that Bankless Academy holds the native token for contributor compensation, unless otherwise discussed.

In terms of receiving a potential grant from Euler, we would request a majority of grant funds to be disbursed in USDC/DAI but are open to negotiating a portion paid in EUL with annual vesting unlocks, over the 2yr period.

Thanks for your questions. Let us know how this sits with you and if we can provide any additional info.

allthecolors · January 22, 2023, 8:20pm

Awesome, that definitely answers my questions and hopefully gives some more concrete justification on projected costs. To @euler_mab 's point about the new UI, is the suggestion to have Bankless Academy wait on posting a snapshot proposal until after the V2 UI is released? Or would folks be comfortable voting beforehand?

Depending on how soon the V2 UI is launching, a possible advantage of voting beforehand is that the lesson could potentially be integrated as part of spreading the word about the V2 UI roll-out. Of course that would require Bankless have some kind of beta access, and it’s up to Labs whether that’s a possibility.

Tetranome · January 23, 2023, 9:41am

I’d suggest we launch the lesson with the new UI. The full lesson production process takes around two months, and it sounds like we’ll see Euler v2 in a similar timeframe.

Whether that means we hold off on the proposal until then, or begin lesson production and then design the quest as the new UI gets ready to launch, it works on our end.

Another factor to consider is the quest network. My understanding is Euler is live on mainnet but not on a scaling network as of yet. It sounds like Q2 will bring a solution. The reason I bring this up is because Euler is going to receive more quest completions if we’re using an L2.
The way I see it, we have two options here: release on mainnet and then convert to L2 when available, or wait for L2 release.

More clarity from the Euler team on the timeframes for v2 UI and L2 release - and how they line up with our production process - would help to navigate these scenarios. And yes, we could definitely use the lesson release as a marketing opportunity for either.

vadym · January 23, 2023, 1:44pm

Totally agree with the comments above that Euler is currently at the stage where focusing on retail acquisition as a growth strategy won’t produce reasonable ROI. DeFi is still a niche market and is used mostly by sophisticated users.

Tetranome · January 23, 2023, 6:50pm

I’m not sure I would describe our audience as retail per say. We’re growing the Bankless Nation - which to us means training the next wave of DeFi/NFT/DAO power users.