Dear Esteemed Bankless community members. We are new in this DAO process and this is our genesis proposal, so please don’t go easy on us. Go ahead and raise all your FUDs here so we can improve and make this a value add to our DAO.
Title: Mentorship Programme - Bankless DAO
Authors: DiGloBo, Angyts, Droste, Redvan
Squad: DiGloBo#9259, angyts#1036
Date Created: 6 July 2021
Date Posted: 16 July 2021
SUMMARY
The Mentorship Program attempts to walk new crypto aficionados by the hand from simple to complex topics like:
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Security in Crypto and in DEFI
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Defi “tech support” for when people are stuck
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Intro to Uniswap
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Deposit and lending activities
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Yield farming
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Eth 2 Staking
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How to join and take a meaningful role in a DAO
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Among others
For this, we will run sessions that are pre-recorded as well as Q&A live sessions. We will aim to produce high quality recorded content which can be used long-term as well as to produce highly knowledgeable mentors that can then be presented to enterprise clients.
BACKGROUND
The Mentorship project can be thought of as a natural extension of the Onboard Project, being useful to people at different stages of their Bankless journey:
- Keeping friends, families, and crypto-noobs safe.
The proliferation of scams presents a major challenge to crypto adoption and hence the Bankless journey. Initial experiences must be positive, safe, inexpensive, and forgiving.
- Onboard completion rates.
There will be some who will find great difficulty in completing the course as massively open online courses (MOOCs) typically see a completion rate of an average of 15%. Interacting with a human will dramatically increase course completion rates. We can bring more people over to the Bankless ecosystem successfully.
- Overcoming fear of losing money.
Going bankless is daunting even for those who are highly motivated. After completing a challenging MOOC course, there is another, larger barrier. Taking a course is one thing, but when your hard-earned money is being sent over experimental networks, the fear of loss and inertia of inaction often win. This is another stage where mentors will be important. They will impart valuable mindset and effective attitudes that will be fundamental in the future financial success of the mentee.
Having a mentor by your side greatly reduces the risk of losing any students’ hard earned money.
- Accredited pool of mentors.
With an accredited pool of mentors, we can better serve a larger community as well as train future generations of mentors. This will help the Bankless movement spread like a virus.
In the future, the top tier mentors will be presented with opportunities to provide consulting work for small and medium enterprises. With ample teaching and training hours under their belt, we can give the stamp of approval with confidence.
What problem or opportunity does this proposal target?
The opportunity is to become the first DAO-led pool of talent and industry-wide best practices documents that people know they can trust and refer to if they have any questions. This disengages them from scammers that come up on public forums, and if there are good experiences, will become a viral way to share the Bankless tenets and knowledge.
What are the driving factors behind why you think this is a good idea?
Currently the crypto journey can be extremely daunting and lonely. With a mentorship programme on top of Bankless Onboard, we will be out there for both simple and complex topics, and will gain recognition as a DAO as a collective of the best minds on the field.
MISSION & VALUES ALIGNMENT
How does this project help the DAO achieve its mission and align with it’s values?
This project is in strong alignment with the goal of getting a billion people to go Bankless. Mentors can build credibility in a reliable, verifiable way. Learners can extract tangible value from the training. Ultimately a healthy economy of learners and teachers, which will sustain the overarching mission of onboarding more people on the Bankless journey will emerge.
SPECIFICATION
We have conducted a short survey, whose results are shown here about the mentorship program. Note that additional feedback from potential students is welcome.
Ideal End State: A decentralised platform for accreditation, rating, selling and purchasing of a mentor’s time and skill.
How we will get started: Centralised and bootstrapped.
- Accreditation:
The following accreditation methods have been proposed:
a) A certified Degen
There is this website that calculates the degen score based on the onchain activities of a wallet.
A high degen score would correlate highly with DeFi activities.
b) A certified Community Leader
There are many individuals who have been very active in the community, and we have to recognise these people as certified mentors. Many of these mentors will also happen to have a high degen score.
c) A high net worth individual
More than 500 ETH worth of assets under management in the wallet might be indicative of vast DEFI knowledge.
d) BANK Bond
For mentors that cannot be certified via above routes, there has been suggestions to place 100K BANK tokens on a security bond. To be released after enough trust has been earned. This is to safeguard the safety of the community.
- Marketplace:
Mentors will open up their calendar and time slots, available skills, participants per session and hourly rate on a platform.
Mentees will book training sessions directly with a mentor. Payment can be accepted in $BANK, $ETH or fiat. We can consider sponsorships too, internally in the DAO or even external to the DAO and relevant to the Bankless mission.
Some sessions will have minimum requirements, such as the completion of specific Onboard courses (and acquiring the coveted POAP badges). This way, before a session can be booked, the mentee’s ‘level up’ could be verified on-chain.
Marketplace will take a small cut from all transactions for the development of this project.
- Rating:
Rubrics for each session to be written up by mentors, and educational outcomes will be rated against this.
Collated survey responses from students can be published.
Mentor page can have a students review page.
- Shared educational resource development:
Educators will contribute to write “Bankless practice guidelines”, like Gold Standards for every educational topic in this industry. For example “wallet guidelines” “Yield farming guidelines”, this will lend credibility to educators, as well as a common platform for educators to agree on. These resources will be freely available on the internet. They will come in a long document and accompanied with a one page quick summary.
When this is written out, a syllabus and a skill tree can be crafted out. For example: Aave level 1 skill, level 2 and level 3. And sessions can be crafted in this format as well.
(I suggest might and magic skill level basic, advanced, expert, master, grandmaster. Sorry i know I’m old.)
- Moving to decentralisation:
Every part of this ecosystem can be moved into a smart contract and mentors and mentees skills proven with actual actions done on the test net or on the mainnet for example. Growth of mentees’ portfolio can be verified on chain. The rating and booking systems could potentially to be moved on chain eventually to garner more commitment and accountability. A live metric showing aggregate score of mentees portfolio growth might even be possible.
The accreditation process can also be moved on chain, requiring a multisig from a group of “grandmasters” to certify that the mentor does indeed meet a particular skill level.
So like in the real world, we often can ascertain the “lineage” of a teacher, like this, we have the blockchain of grandmaster Bankless Jedis.
- Moving to consultancy:
With a class and alumni portfolio to show, our mentors will be enabled to sell our expertise to small and medium enterprises to help them get up to speed with crypto. (See upcoming proposal)
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
Funding required to sponsor for season one participation: ie free for all, but platform will pay for all participation. In the future we plan to allow mentors to name their price and allow the market to decide if they want to take up the course.
For this stage, we estimate 1890 USD denominated in $BANK.
We are targeting 3 main courses to start: Ethstaking workshop level 1, BED index/Uniswap level 1, Crypto security workshop level 1
The following salary norms are assumed: basic: 30/h, advanced 50/h, expert 100/h, master 300/h, grandmaster >500/h
| Description | Hourly Rate | Hours | Sum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Manager: Diglobo | 50 | 6 | 300 |
| Project Manager: Angyts | 50 | 6 | 300 |
| — | — | — | — |
| Crypto Security Course: Prep | 30 | 6 | 180 |
| Crypto Security Course: Workshop (2H) x 2 runs | 30 | 4 | 120 |
| — | — | — | — |
| Bed Index + Uniswap Course: Prep | 30 | 8 | 240 |
| Bed Index + Uniswap Course: Workshop (2H) : Instructor x 2 | 50 | 4 | 200 |
| — | — | — | — |
| Ethstaking Course: Prep | 50 | 5 | 250 |
| Ethstaking Course: Main Instructor | 50 | 3 | 150 |
| Ethstaking Course: Assistant Instructor | 30 | 3 | 150 |
Total proposed budget: 1890 USD
Thereafter free market forces should take over.
There should be a low enough price point that will “bite” and encourage usage.
And there will always be a high enough price point that a mentee will still be able to extract mileage from the mentorship session, and the mentor will earn enough.
With enough traction, the marketplace will generate enough revenue to fund its own development.
BRAND USAGE
We need to name our mentors and will need some name suggestions.
Bankless mentors. ?Degen Jedi ? DeFi grandmaster.
We also need a page to display the information about the programme, mentors’ schedules, and season availability and reviews. These could all the within the DAOs website, under “LEARN”.
SUCCESS METRICS OR KPIS
Total revenue of the entire program.
Human use Outcomes:
- Number of monthly active users: mentors and mentees.
- Number of training hours conducted.
- Attendance rate.
- Completion rates of mentees.
Educational outcomes metrics:
- Survey scores of mentees including net promotion scores > 9.
- Number of “Bankless practice guidelines” written up.
NEXT STEPS
Education guild will call for mentors who are interested to teach and will actively seek out known community leaders to head them.
We will open up some courses currently known to be of interest to the community:
- ETH 2 self staking
- BED index and Uniswap
- Basic crypto and DEFI security
Request for BANK funding for the season one round of mentors.
If necessary, request external funding from e.g., Uniswap grants or other organisations meant for entry-level educational projects.
SQUAD BACKGROUND
Who you are & disclose your interests with making the proposal
DiGloBo is a PhD student that has been part of educational workshops both as attendee and as organiser, has a Youtube Channel dedicated to sharing reliable crypto information with spanish listeners. He has been into crypto since 2017, and understands that Security, Ethereum, NFTs, and honesty are core to crypto tenets. I see the Mentorship program as a good source of good quality information, virality for the DAO and its tenets, and a great platform to produce high quality, apolitical content within.
Angyts is a meatspace educator, adjunct lecturer at a local university. He stumbled into crypto in 2019 and fell down the rabbit hole. He believes in the importance of lifelong mentors in imparting skills and attitudes. And the most important of all, mentors open new doors, and allows mentees to access the wisdom of the community and extract the best value out of it. He is a part of the Education guild at Bankless DAO since Jun 2021.
POLL
- I support the mentorship program
- I DO NOT support the mentorship program