EduCoin （EDU）白皮书.pdf

EduCoin Whitepaper Blockchain-based Global Online Education Plat EduCoin Foundation Summary Accompanying the explosive growth of the Internet and mobile Internet, comes the digitization of education resources and ready availability of online education. In recent years, the market share of online education has ben on the increase. Currently, online education institutions are providing education services in a centralized maner. Despite the optimistic outlook on the current state of online education, there are significant problems accompanying this centralized mode of operation. Some examples include the lack of openes and impartiality in teaching uations, an overly high comission rate of up to 50 charged by online educational plats, and porly motivated developers resulting in substandard educational content. The loss of value through these inefficiencies wil be ultimately passed to users. The resulting state of affairs is not ideal for the future growth and development of the online education industry. EduCoin Foundation Ltd. “the Foundation” intends to create the world’s first blockchain-based, decentralized online education plat, EduCoin “the EduCoin Plat”. The digital cryptocurrency EDU “EDU” is intended to be tailor-made for this plat, to support of the vision to construct a global decentralized education plat focused on facilitating the utilization and provision of education services, the research and development of educational content, and the monitoring and asesment of teaching quality for users around the world. The EduCoin Plat, the economic system of this plat and basic services surrounding it, is intended to be designed for the sharing of online education services and contents globally. It has the potential to bring together students and teachers throughout the world in a single ecosystem matching them specificaly acording to their personal requirements and abilities. It is intended to bridge the gaps of cultures, countries and languages, creating a new and improved educational environment. Table of Contents 1 1 2 4 4 5 6 7 7 8 8 9 10 10 14 16 19 20 21 21 21 23 1 Market Analysis and Background Introduction 1.1 Market Environment 1.2 Main Problems 2 What is EduCoin 2.1 Plat Description 2.2 Busines Proceses 3 Infrastructure and Architecture 3.1 Consensus Layer 3.2 Content Delivery Layer 3.3 Real-time Comunication Layer 3.4 Payment Channels 3.5 Identity Authentication System 4 Economic Mechanism and Incentives 4.1 Economic System 4.2 Incentive Mechanism 4.3 Protocol Design 5 EDU Token Exchange 6 Working Roadmap 7 Legal Afairs and Risk Statement 7.1 Legal Structure 7.2 Risks 7.3 Disclaimer 1. Market Analysis and Background Introduction 1.1 Market Environment Global education industry is at a stage of rapid expansion in terms of both the overal industry size and market dynamics. Acording to latest research report, the overal size of China’s education industry in 2016 was 5 trilion USD, and this figure is estimated to increase to 8.1 trilion USD by 2020. Under the general backdrop of consumption upgrade, more niches are created within the education market, and this has defined the characteristics of the education market, namely, strong demand and high growth. Compared with traditional education, online education breaks the time and space constraints on the traditional mode of education, and boasts several key characteristics, such as high efficiency, low barrier to entry, cost saving and abundant teaching resources. Moreover, as the “Internet” model moves forward, numerous online education plats emerge and market demand is steadily on the increase. The size of global online education market is 118 bilion USD in 2017, and this figure is estimated to hit 143 bilion USD in 2018, exced 175 bilion USD mark in 2019 and reach 423 bilion USD in 2023. 1 At present, adolescent education, especialy the teaching of languages, has gradualy become an important part of the family education blueprint, and parents are investing more and more money in the language education for their children. Acording to a report entitled Market Analysis of China’s Children English Training Industry for 2015-2020 released by the survey report website affiliated to National Bureau of Statistics, the present size of children English training market stands at about 10 bilion USD and is growing at an annual rate of 20. At the same time, with the advancement of the globalization proces, there is increasing demand for language skils in daily work, busines travels and other scenarios, and the adult language education market is growing year by year. Acording to the Whitepaper 2017 for China’s Online Adult Foreign Language Education Industry published by iResearch together with Hujiang English, the market size and user base of the online adult foreign language education industry have undergone drastic growth. In the face of strong market demand, the language training institutions in China has asumed a skyrocketing growth trend. On the strengths of the Internet, online education has a great impact on the traditional market for adolescent language education with its strong competitive edge. Online live clases, as one of online learning, outpers recorded broadcasts in terms of interactivity and teaching efficiency, and have become the hottest of language tutoring and learning for the time being. 1.2 Main Problems Various online education plats spring up constantly in response to the high levels of market demand. However, the excesively high advertising costs of online education institutions during their development proces continuously push up product prices, so the price advantage over the traditional education model has been lost. Despite the optimistic outlook on the current state of online education, the market is stil at the developmental stage and market entrants face many problems and development bottlenecks. On the whole, centralized online education models can be observed to provide education at an extremely low efficiency. Bottleneck one High Marketing Cost and High Commision Charged by Centralized Plats Education institutions have to pay high sales and marketing costs to recruit students, but the efficiency of recruitment per RMB spent is stil very low. In addition, even though the commision levels charged by online educational institutions is generaly set at 50; given high cost of customer acquisition, the profit margin of education institutions generaly stands around 20 or les, and many 2 of them are unable to make profits. Al in al, due to the current state of the education market, education service providers and content research cannot receive enough income, but users have to bear higher expenses. Bottleneck Two Multi-level Management of Teachers Result in Great Friction and Waste due to Lack of Open and Transparent uation of Teaching Quality A famous listed education company is known to prioritize training its teachers on how to give a blow to the self-confidence of parents in the area of educating their children in order to get them to pay fees for more clases, rather than value users’ feedback on teaching quality. Also, the pricing system is not linked to education quality. In addition, despite the heavy investments of some education institutions, they have a large number of redundant teachers, and many of their teachers are not asigned a sufficient amount of clases. Meanwhile, inadequate income results in continuous turnover of excelent teachers and worsens the teaching quality, giving rise to a vicious cycle. Bottleneck Thre Lack of an Incentive Mechanism to Fuly Motivate Content Researchers and System Developers in the Education Ecosystem Plus Enormous Duplicate Construction and Redundancy Under great presure to recruit more students, most education institutions are driven to give great importance to sales and marketing. However, in the area of value distribution, they tend to ignore the design of teaching products, research of teaching content and development of teaching systems, as wel as the upgrading of education services. The above conditions ultimately causes students to leave, thus giving rise to a vicious cycle. At the same time, teacher training providers, teaching product developers and technical product developers in the industry have a limit to the number educational institutions they are able to reach, and are unable to reach the increasing number of smal institutions. Moreover, due to the lack of a unified standard, the functions of products developed are virtualy the same, resulting in a waste of resources, and quality products cannot get support from the market, restricting the development of the online education industry. 3 2. What is EduCoin The EduCoin Plat, wil be tailor made for the facilitation of online education content sharing and service. EDU is intended to be the world’s first digital cryptocurrency designed for the consumption and provision of education services, sharing of teaching products and technologies, as wel as monitoring and uation of teaching quality, on the basis of the point-to-point network technology based on blockchain and smart contracts. 2.1 Plat Description The EduCoin Plat is designed to be a blockchain-based decentralized global education service plat. The EduCoin Plat facilitates the distribution of education contents and completion of education service transactions via its native digital cryptocurrency named EDU; the plat alows two or more parties to connect to it to per education related services or share content. On the EduCoin Plat, service providers can fix the prices of the teaching content they share and the per-minute rates of the teaching services they provide, while consumers wil make payments in EDU at such rates when using the services provided. The smart contract software of the EduCoin Plat can finish such exchange proceses seamlesly via blockchain. In the early stages of operations, the EduCoin Plat wil target online education on the basis of large-traffic education websites existing on the market, with the education content covering various services including without limitation various text, audio, video, real-person services. The EduCoin Plat wil focus on education services such as live broadcast, question answering and homework correcting. Based on the value of usage, the EduCoin Plat aims to build a complete ecosystem incorporating four types of participants from the education industry, namely, providers, consumers, diseminators, and supporters such as suppliers of teaching contents and products, technology suppliers and credit raters. By fostering a pleasant community atmosphere and a running a scientificaly based value distribution system, the EduCoin Plat aims to incentivize teaching service providers, diseminators and supporters to optimize their services continuously, with the eventual goal of developing the entire community into a high quality globalised education community. Within the plat, a brand-new and complete incentive-based value system wil be created through the efforts of various participants like content providers, consumers, diseminators and supporters. Of course, the application scenarios 4 of the EduCoin Plat are not only limited to the education sector – it can cater for virtual transactions in any field of content sharing. 2.2 Busines Proceses ‣ Education service providers fix the prices of their education services denominated in EDU and publish relevant ination, so that service consumers can know about their services ‣ Consumers wil set service prices acording to their expectations, and the system wil match the prices with high-quality and appropriate teachers or content; ‣ After teaching services are pered, fees wil be setled via smart contracts as the EduCoin Plat develops, a smart pricing system wil be used, and the prices of services and contents wil be continuously adjusted based on the uation of teaching quality and ongoing user feedback 5 3. Infrastructure and Architecture The infrastructure for the EduCoin Plat is shown in the chart below, and it requires collaboration with partners to promote the busines proces and boost the development of the entire ecosystem. The protocol of the EduCoin Plat is divided into three layers, namely, consensus layer, teaching content layer and real-time communication layer. Wherein, on the consensus layer, it is possible to track the ownership and content atribute of the goods and services on the online education plat; on the teaching content layer, consumers can use EDU to view or replay the teaching contents and relevant lecture notes on the online education plat; on the real-time communication layer, a function is intended to be available for the interactions betwen consumers and service providers. 6 3.1 Consensus Layer The EduCoin Plat intends to maintain a distributed ledger via Ethereum smart contract, while consumers can connect to Ethereum network to obtain the timely status updates of teaching contents and smart contract. Each teaching content and service are unique in the network. If a consumer needs to use a certain course resource, he/she has to make purchase with a specified amount of EDU. EDU serves as the substitute for the necesary cost of the teaching resource. 3.2 Content Delivery Layer The EduCoin Plat utilizes a decentralized storage system to present the contents required by the virtual world in a distributed way. Each block of space to be presented wil have a reference to the description of the corresponding teaching content, and this reference can be retrieved via smart contract. Whereas, the description of the corresponding teaching content wil include a file list used to present the content, a service list provided by the content provider, and an entry point used to coordinate the object and its behavior location. This document must state 1 Content file referring to the content file and other relevant contents. This is provided to enable users to know the spatial location of the required teaching resource without specialy giving instructions. 2 Script entry point the script system controls the spatial location and behavior of the content. This enables application and video frame to appear in the space. The script system is also required