Premise
- A decentralized learn-to-earn marketplace for class creators, DAOs offering community classes, and those looking to join DAOs through classes
- A web3 discovery layer: a way for anyone to find and participate in the right DAO for them through classes—and a way for DAOs to recruit top contributors to their community
Structure
- Class creators offer fully public and open-source syllabi, worksheets, assignments, lectures, podcast discussions, etc., preferably across a wide range of media
- Any DAO can use the classes for free or pay participants in native tokens to take them in order to teach skills, generate projects, and most significantly, acquire top contributors to the DAO
- Participants can find classes through the marketplace and apply to take them through paying DAOs
- Highest-paying DAOs will have their pick of talent to join their team; lower-paying DAOs will capture the next generation of talent as they build credibility in the web3 ecosystem
- DAOs use protocol to pay out contributors, with a cut going to the the protocol, to course creators, and to the authors used in the course (provided they offer their wallet address)
Benefits for authors and course creators
- Both authors and course creators online have always depended on students to pay them for their work. Because students take courses to gain economic power they don't have, course creators traditionally have generated huge value to the market that they've been unable to capture in any way from students.
- Because delos offers learn-to-earn bounties for completing classes through DAOs, it incentivizes DAOs to pay top money to acquire top talent—and the more DAOs pay, the more authors and course creators get. For the first time, their earnings correlate to the value they produce.
- Best of all, because delos is decentralized and payments are automated through smart contracts, the protocol only needs wallet addresses for authors and course creators to ensure they get paid out.
- For the first time, writers will accrue value based on the usage and impact of their writing rather than the cover price—while capturing the full demand curve for what DAOs are willing to pay to use their work to the benefits of their own community.
Benefits for DAOs
- Cohort-based classes are one of the best ways to build out the deeper social foundations of a community through dialog, collaboration, and trust-building exercises.
- The classes themselves can train contributors in valuable skills to use in the DAO.
- Classes can encompass projects that provide tangible value to the DAO.
- Discussion in classes and book clubs can focus on major issues for the DAO and generate key insight and perspective.
- Perhaps most significantly, DAOs can offer paid classes as a way to draw contributors to the DAO while giving them educational onboarding through the class itself that will help them contribute meaningfully. By paying, they'll be able to pick for candidates that best match the DAO and ensure they're intentional rather than simply permissionless in building out diverse communities. We can think about DAOs like basketball teams in draft season, picking who they want for their teams (and perhaps deciding to pay less to get unproven talent they can help train).