Description

Hey everyone.

If you don't know me, you can read my intro https://makers.bolt.fun/story/santos-intro--409.

I'm happy to share with the BOLT.FUN community first my pre-announcement of emeralize. I know everyone here are builders and care about the ecosystem, so I before I make any additional changes and launch emeralize on other sites, I wanted to share with you all first.

Below, you'll begin learning about emeralize. Enjoy!

Mission statement

Help individuals become the best versions of themselves and do what they love.

Why emeralize

I built emeralize because I believe that we need a new model to obsolete the old model. The legacy education system’s model. What does that mean?

It means that the old ways of doing things needs a revamp. The legacy education system is failing us with many students incurring massive amounts of debt, underemployed, indoctrinated, and in many cases not learning practical skills. Educators are also paid minimal amounts of money, wherein, they are not even allowed to teach what they wish to teach.

Platforms like YouTube can also be great for free learning and ad revenue opportunities for the educator, though, require permission to earn and the learner to possibly get distracted from recommendations that are unrelated to what they learner is learning and take them out of flow.

Lastly, marketplace and learning management systems like Udemy, Coursera, and edX work quite well to bridge the gap, however, a big problem is that there is not a linear path to go from step A ? Z and the resources are still unaffordable for much of the world at their current pricing. They also have very low retention and completion rates of their resources.

I built emeralize as a way to give everyone the opportunity to learn, educate, and earn the best money ever created to begin addressing this problem.

Vision

Virtuous cycle of transacting that enables everyone the ability to afford the best in class educational resources and tools, learn the resources with a focus on mastery rather than memorization, solve problems with the knowledge they learn to gain experience, and share their resources with others as an educator. Enable everyone to become an educator and the best educators to earn the most sats.

Who’s this for

We are building this for content creators who predominately produce educational content, including art. We will allow all works of content as long as it is not explicit, though, ideally should be informative / educational.

How does emeralize work

As an educator or content creator, you may create resources that are written, audio, or video or courses which are sets of resources that help a learner get from step A -> Z in a particular topic. You can give these resources and courses out for free or you may paywall them (meaning requirement payment in order for the learner to use them.) You have the ability earn tips on every resource and course, regardless if it is paid or free.

Learners are individuals purchasing and using the resources to learn.

Both these user personas form the buying and selling of the marketplace, along with the development, creation, and use of these resources.

We charge a 2% platform fee to start. We may increase this to a maximum of 10% over time. Currently, marketplace platforms like TeachersPayTeachers, Udemy, ui8.net, and more charge approximately ~30%, which results in a significant savings to educators. We want to use a portion of this revenue to sustainably reward users for learning.

What is emeralize

We built an educational platform and marketplace allowing learners and educators to get paid for being great at what they do. We use bitcoin as money since it's quicker and easier to transfer globally, even in tiny amounts. And if you ever want to convert it to your local currency, there are plenty of ways.

We are building the earn / spend use case of micro-transactions. What this means is that typically individuals have to purchase bitcoin or sats (the smallest denomination of bitcoin, akin to cents to dollars) using some sort of government issued currency. This typically can have a mark-up, fee, and require legal identification in order to get access to bitcoin. Instead, we allow educators or educational content creators post their resources that will earn them purchases and/or tips directly in bitcoin that is credited to their wallet. Funds may be withdrawn to a lightning wallet at any time. You never need to trust us beyond 10 sats. Ideally, resources should be affordable such that anyone can afford them.

Why bitcoin

We believe that bitcoin is the best money ever created. Why? It has the best monetary properties across any money that currently exists. So educators, can be sure what they are earning is valuable.

Sites like Udemy currently exclude many users due to the fact that their currency may not be supported. This keeps users out. For example, if someone in India who has Rupees wants to buy a resource like a course priced in USD, they cannot complete the transaction or if they have a card that supports this (few in India do), the learner will pay a foreign transaction fee and the platform will pay 3% + 30 cents, which on a $1 transaction is 33% fee. We can do this instead for 2% no matter the cost of the resource, even fractions of a cent.

Speaking of which, thanks to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, we can now price resources at a cost that anyone can afford (as low as .002 cents), though, if you have a significant number of users purchasing and tipping, can be a large sum. Transactions are very cheap to process, instant, and final and scale to millions of transactions per second, which is not something any other blockchain can accomplish.

What’s next

Stay tuned, this is just the beginning. We have a lot of awesome features coming soon!

Get Started

Try it out by posting your creations or learning now at emeralize.com starting with https://emeralize.com/resource/41/ .

Report bugs

If you have any issues, run into any errors, get help on our discord: https://discord.gg/xggf6nhh .