Crypto Mentorship Program

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.

Working Document here


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:

  • Security in Crypto and in DEFI

  • Defi “tech support” for when people are stuck

  • Intro to Uniswap

  • Deposit and lending activities

  • Yield farming

  • Eth 2 Staking

  • How to join and take a meaningful role in a DAO

  • 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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.)

  1. 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.

  1. 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
0 voters
6 Likes

Here it is outlined how you can make a poll on Discourse: How to Create Polls - faq - Discourse Meta

I didn’t read the whole post very thoroughly, but I like the idea and I support it.

However, I don’t like the use of “degen”. I think it will turn some people off.

2 Likes

oh!! i’m so sorry, i totally forgot about adding a poll!!!

I agree I am not a fan of ‘degen’ in this context, I am very fond of both Jedi and Grandmaster

1 Like

I am very much in alignment with this proposal, I am in full support if it and would love to see it get pushed through.

1 Like

One suggestion is that community-approved projects could sponsor the mentors’ honorariums (fully or partially) as there would be free marketing and associations to the respective project

1 Like

Great project!

I assume one could buy time from a mentor and share it? (Group classes)
Would enable us to easier sell to people who does not want to spend a lot of money.

Also would the DAO get a part of the marketplace fee’s? Or what are the DAO return on the investment apart from the trail courses?

Again, great project and write-up!

I think mentorship programs are one of the best ways to give people personal and real connection to the subject or goal at hand. Crypto is a scary world to a lot of people. mentorship programs will basically make it less scary for the people willing to partake. In a world of fud, technical jargons and information overload, Mentorship programs provide human touch and well organized way of accessing information and education.

LOVE IT. LFG.
]

4 Likes

Thanks for taking your time to read through this.

  1. Yes, the first season will be sponsored by Bankless DAO, mostly for a small group of BANKLESS members, guests and friends first. Mostly to ensure quality of educational product.

I guess subsequently, organisations / DAOs / Whales can sponsor specific courses for other people. Can you imagine a day you get a gift card? Here’s your personal crypto mentor gift card, fully paid for by your girlfriend. hahah

  1. The marketplace will be some ? software or ? off the shelf product that we will use. I would reckon about 10% platform fees will be required for future development.

  2. I’m not certain of the “ROI” in terms of money at the moment. But I firmly believe in the process of mentorships. The human capital that we grow via direct mentorships will grow exponentially in time to come. Nobody can tell if the mentee you are training today could be the next Satoshi Nakamoto.

Exactly.

That’s something I realised that the ethereans clearly differ from bitcoiners.

We are not afraid to come out, show our face and guide people and create high touch points.

My understanding is that the bot in development was named through a multi-series poll with 5 names at a time. That was a community decision prior to this proposal.

I’m not a fan either and did not vote for degen; am on the Discord daily and missed the voting window on most of them. I thought the poll was weirdly conducted; but it was done that way due to limitations of the poll app.

Oh you mean the DEGEN bot, i guess thats fine and for fun.

But for the “name” of our Bankless Mentor. Yes, i’ll make sure there will be a proper voting period for that.

Do you have any ideas right now?

Thank you for the reply, I agree with your stance of “soft” ROI. However I think the general approach has been that projects with on-chain revenues share those with the DAO when using the brand.

It would also align your proposal with the season priorities of both revenues and the DAO mission.

To be clear, I’m very positive to this project and its development could easily enhance onbaording.

I definitely would like to share revenue with the DAO.

These are the priorities for funding:

  1. mentors time should be properly compensated.
  2. development funds should be allocated to build infrastructure.
  3. funds should be paid to the DAO because this project exists only because of the DAO.

But i’m a little cold feet right now, because we are so early into this… honestly I don’t know maybe this whole thing might even flop… like nobody signs up… sorry i’m a super pessimist.

In any case, I would appreciate any kind of suggestions or criticisms.

What do you think should be a healthy “revenue” and “take rate” from the mentors: because a too high level will turn mentors away from the platform.

I think the easiest by far is to use some kind of revenue split, as an example 70% to mentors and then 15% each to program / dao (not sure if there is a set %, I’ve seen 20% to DAO on some other projects).

Then you allow mentors to weigh in on prices in their category, you wouldn’t have to fix the levels. A popular mentor might be worth way more than his/hers skills in crypto, they might also be a good teacher. Categorize mentors by skill but let pricing be free i would say.

I assume payment will flow something like Customer → DAO/Program → Mentor to allow us full controll and to increase the value of the platfrom.

If this gets going, your valueproposition to mentors would be insane. I think 30% would be very much worth not having to do any admin or have any CAC.

Let me know if you would like to discuss further of forum. But the above is how I would approach it.

2 Likes

Thank you for your kind input.

I think every single cent collected from the program will be used 101% in the development and research. It may be crypto yes. But it will have to conform to a high instructional design and curriculum design standards. As well as software engineering of the platform itself. And lastly, time and money will be spent writing up “best practices” for each and every part of the curriculum.

I’m a dreamer indeed. But we have to dream big.

1 Like

Personally I have been involved in dissemination in Italy for a long time now and if there is one thing I understand is that you can have the most complete and functional product but if you do not have the budget to sponsor your service the results will be unsatisfactory.

For this reason I think we should think of a percentage to be reinvested in marketing based on the target we want to reach. I think 10% is an adequate percentage.

2 Likes

Thanks for the suggestion. Can I please clarify. Is it 10% platform fee for all users?

Or 10% marketing fee out from the 10% platform fee? = 1%

I’ll explain. I would leave 10% of the distribution of potential profits which will be directly reinvested in marketing operations. Therefore I think that it’s necessary to calibrate the cost of access also on the basis of this output. We need to have an idea of ​​how many potential payers could be and understand what the optimal price is to ensure that both the DAO and the mentors have a fair compensation.

Hey, DiGloBo here.

This is a great idea. We will keep it in mind!

For now the courses are “requested” by the community, but indeed we can offer courses for other things as well.

1 Like