This is an exploration of a half-baked idea that won't leave me alone. It's probably naive, definitely incomplete, but I think there's something here worth thinking through together.

The Overlooked Revolution

We've decentralized money (Bitcoin), computation (Ethereum), storage (Filecoin), and even social networks (Lens). But there's one massive market we've barely touched—human capital itself. Not just the $7 trillion education industry, but the fundamental infrastructure for how talent is discovered, developed, and deployed in the global economy.

The Fundamental Misalignment of Traditional Education

Before we dive into solutions, let's be honest about why current education—even "market-based" private education—is fundamentally broken.

Traditional education suffers from a critical incentive misalignment. Teachers and institutions get paid regardless of whether students succeed in their careers. A professor's salary doesn't change whether their students become industry leaders or struggle to find employment. Their incentives are tied to paper grades, research output, or student satisfaction surveys—metrics that have little correlation with actual career outcomes. This isn't the teachers' fault; it's a systemic design flaw.

Even in vocational education, where the goal is explicitly about employment, the institution gets paid upfront. A coding bootcamp charges $20,000 whether you become a senior developer or drop out after week two. They might tout job placement rates, but those statistics are easily manipulated and impossible to verify independently.

The result? Education has deviated from its purpose. Instead of optimizing for genuine skill transfer and long-term career success, institutions optimize for what gets measured: test scores, graduation rates, and short-term job placements.

The Myth of Market-Based Education

You might argue that private education already operates as a market. Students choose schools, schools compete for students—isn't that enough? The answer is emphatically no, and here's why.

First, the current education market has terrible price discovery. Harvard charges $50,000 per year not because that's the value of the education provided, but because of artificial scarcity and signaling value. Meanwhile, a community college charges $3,000 not because the education is proportionally worse, but because of subsidies and different market positioning. The actual value created—the increase in student productivity and earnings—is completely disconnected from the price.

Second, even prestigious private institutions don't truly have skin in the game. Their reputation might suffer if graduates consistently fail, but this feedback loop takes decades to materialize. By then, administrators have retired, faculty have moved on, and the students who suffered have no recourse. The timeframe for accountability is so long that it's effectively nonexistent.

Third, the barriers to entry for new educational institutions are insurmountable for most innovators. Building reputation takes generations. Getting accreditation requires jumping through byzantine regulatory hoops. By the time a new institution establishes credibility, the skills they're teaching might be obsolete. This creates a monopolistic environment where incumbents can coast on historical reputation while delivering diminishing value.

The Education Fraud Problem

Perhaps most perniciously, the current system is rife with what we might charitably call "education fraud." Institutions make promises about career outcomes they can't keep. They cite misleading statistics about graduate salaries, conveniently omitting that correlation isn't causation—maybe successful people tend to go to certain schools, not the other way around.

When these institutions fail to deliver, they simply blame the student. "You didn't network enough." "You should have studied harder." "The job market is tough right now." The institution keeps the tuition, the student keeps the debt, and the cycle continues.

Even worse, fraudulent institutions can simply suppress negative feedback. They threaten students with lawsuits for negative reviews, bury critical articles through SEO manipulation, and cherry-pick success stories for marketing materials. The information asymmetry is so severe that students can't make informed decisions.

The Equity Problem Nobody Wants to Address

And then there's the elephant in the room: education equity. The current system requires students to pay massive sums upfront with zero guarantee of return. This automatically excludes anyone without access to capital, regardless of their potential. A brilliant teenager from a low-income family faces an impossible choice: take on crushing debt for the possibility of advancement, or skip higher education entirely.

The few solutions that exist—scholarships, financial aid—are band-aids on a severed artery. They help a lucky few while leaving the systemic problem untouched. Income Share Agreements were a step forward, but they're still controlled by centralized institutions with their own profit motives, not aligned with student success.

The Core Idea: Teachers as Investors

This is where blockchain technology offers a fundamentally different approach. Instead of students paying $50,000 upfront for uncertain returns, imagine this mechanism: Students and educators enter into an on-chain Income Sharing Agreement. The student stakes some collateral (perhaps $5,000) as a commitment device. The educator provides training. When the student gets a job, a percentage of their salary (say 10-15%) automatically flows to the educator via smart contracts for a fixed period (maybe 2-3 years).

This isn't just moving existing education onto a blockchain. It's restructuring the fundamental economic relationship. The educator is no longer selling a course—they're making an investment decision. Should I invest three months of my time training this person? What's their potential? What's my expected ROI?

Why This Alignment Changes Everything

Consider how radically this shifts incentives. Currently, a bootcamp gets paid whether you become a successful developer or drop out after week one. In our model, if you don't get a job, the educator gets nothing except your staked collateral. If you get a $60,000 per year job, they might receive $6,000-9,000 annually. If you become a senior engineer making $200,000, they're collecting $20,000-30,000 per year.

This means educators would naturally optimize for long-term career success, not just immediate job placement. They'd stay involved after graduation because helping you get promoted directly increases their returns. They'd focus on teaching genuinely valuable skills because the market—through employer salaries—ruthlessly judges educational quality.

Bad educators can't hide behind marketing or manipulated statistics. Their income depends entirely on producing successful students. One educator might have a 90% employment rate with average salaries of $150,000. Another might have a 30% employment rate with average salaries of $60,000. These numbers, recorded immutably on-chain, speak louder than any marketing campaign.

True Price Discovery Through Market Mechanisms

Here's where it gets even more interesting. This shouldn't be a fixed-price system—it should be a true marketplace where students and educators bid on each other.

A student with a strong background and high potential might offer only 8% revenue share for 18 months. They know they're a good investment. A complete beginner might offer 15% for 3 years because they need more support and represent higher risk. Meanwhile, an educator with a proven track record could demand higher percentages, while an unproven educator might accept lower rates to build their reputation.

This creates genuine price discovery. The value of learning React from a specific teacher becomes exactly what the market says it's worth, not what an institution arbitrarily decides to charge. If machine learning skills are in high demand, educators who can effectively teach them will command premium rates. If the market is saturated with web designers, those courses will naturally become cheaper.

The Employer as the Ultimate Oracle

Traditional education relies on easily gamed metrics—grades that suffer from inflation, standardized tests that measure test-taking ability, credentials that become meaningless as everyone gets them. Our system has a brilliantly simple solution: employers become the quality validators.

When a Web3 company hires a graduate and pays them $120,000 per year on-chain, they're providing an immutable, unfakeable signal of that person's actual productivity. They're not filling out a survey or writing a review—they're putting their money where their assessment is. The student and educator are economically aligned as a single unit being evaluated by the market.

This solves the fraud problem elegantly. An educator can't fake their success when it's measured in actual employer payments recorded on a public ledger. They can't suppress negative outcomes when every student's employment status is transparent. They can't make false promises when their historical performance is visible to everyone.

Democratizing Access to Education

Perhaps most importantly, this model addresses the equity problem. Instead of requiring $50,000 upfront, students need only stake a smaller commitment amount. The educator bears the risk of the student's success, not the student themselves. This fundamentally democratizes access to quality education.

A talented student from a low-income background becomes an attractive investment opportunity. Educators actively seek out high-potential students regardless of their financial situation. The student's future productivity, not their current bank account, determines their access to education.

The Problems We Haven't Solved

Let me be transparent about the challenges we're still grappling with. The collusion problem: what stops educators and students from creating fake employment contracts? Our current thinking is that the student's stake helps, and perhaps employers need skin in the game too—maybe they get access to the talent pipeline only if they participate honestly.

The adverse selection problem: won't only desperate students who can't get traditional funding join initially? Maybe, but as successful graduates emerge and the reputation system builds, transparent on-chain credentials might become more valuable than traditional degrees.

The enforcement problem: what happens when someone gets paid partially off-chain to avoid the revenue share? This is tough. We might need to start with Web3-native companies that already do most transactions on-chain.

Why Start with Web3 Education?

The Web3 ecosystem is the perfect testbed. Salaries are often already paid on-chain. The community understands and values decentralized systems. There's massive demand for blockchain developers. DAOs and crypto companies would likely prefer hiring from a transparent, verifiable talent pipeline.

Imagine starting with Solidity bootcamps. The entire learning journey, from first smart contract to first job at a DeFi protocol, recorded immutably on-chain. It's a small enough niche to experiment with but valuable enough to attract serious participants.

An Invitation to Think Together

This isn't a whitepaper or a project announcement. It's an invitation to think together about whether we can build better infrastructure for human capital. The current education system is so fundamentally broken that even a partially successful alternative could transform millions of lives.

If you're an educator frustrated with teaching to tests instead of teaching skills that matter, I want to hear your perspective. If you're a student drowning in debt for a degree that isn't delivering value, share your experience. If you're an employer struggling to find qualified candidates despite millions of "educated" applicants, tell me what's missing.

What am I overlooking? What would make this actually work? Let's explore this together—because if we can crack this, we're not just fixing education. We're creating a new primitive for how human potential gets discovered, developed, and deployed in the global economy.

Welcome to my personal blog where I share thoughts on technology, programming, and life.

A Place to Breathe and Reflect

This blog is my attempt to create a place where thoughts can breathe. Over the years, I have realized that ideas fade quickly if they are not captured, and experiences lose their weight if they are not reflected upon. Writing, for me, is not only a way to communicate but also a way to think—an invitation to slow down in a world that moves too fast.

Lessons from Building Software

As an engineer, I spend much of my time in the practical trenches of technology. I write code, design systems, and wrestle with the trade-offs between performance, simplicity, and scalability. Projects like Delong, and earlier ones such as Papyrus, have taught me that building software is never just about tools or frameworks—it is about clarity of vision, the courage to make decisions, and the humility to revisit them when reality proves otherwise.

Exploring Interests and Frontiers

My interests are broad, sometimes too broad for my own good. I enjoy diving deep into web development, exploring the elegance of React and Next.js, the type safety of TypeScript, and the art of crafting user experiences that feel seamless. At the same time, I am fascinated by the frontier of blockchain and Web3. Beyond the specifics of any technology, I care about the timeless principles of software engineering: clean abstractions, resilient architectures, and the ways in which good tools empower people.

Beyond Code, Towards Life

But this blog will not be limited to code. I believe every engineer is also a human being, and behind every technical decision lies a personal story. Sometimes I will write about the rhythm of learning, the doubts that come with tackling new fields, or the balance between work and life. Other times, I may simply record passing reflections on how technology is changing the world around us—how it reshapes communities, economies, and even our sense of meaning.

An Invitation to Connect

So, welcome. This is a place for notes, experiments, and reflections—sometimes technical, sometimes philosophical, always personal. Thank you for visiting, and I hope the time you spend here leaves you with something worth carrying into your own path.

When I first heard about Bancor raising $153 million in just three hours on June 12, 2017, I knew I was witnessing history. Not because of the amount—though it was staggering—but because of what it represented: the moment when smart contracts proved they could revolutionize fundraising forever. Today, I want to take you through the technical brilliance and human drama behind Initial Coin Offerings, using Bancor as our lens to understand how a few hundred lines of code changed venture capital forever.

The Genesis of ERC-20: More Than Just a Standard

Before we can understand how Bancor pulled off their historic ICO, we need to understand the foundation it was built on: the ERC-20 standard. The story begins in late 2015, when Fabian Vogelsteller, a developer working on Ethereum's Mist wallet, faced a frustrating problem. Every new token on Ethereum implemented its own unique interface. Imagine trying to build a wallet that needed custom code for every single token it wanted to support—it was an integration nightmare.

On November 19, 2015, Vogelsteller submitted Ethereum Improvement Proposal #20 (EIP-20) to GitHub. The proposal was elegantly simple, defining just six mandatory functions and three optional ones:

// The genius of ERC-20 lies in its minimalism
interface IERC20 {
    // The mandatory six - each serving a crucial purpose
    function totalSupply() external view returns (uint256);
    function balanceOf(address account) external view returns (uint256);
    function transfer(address recipient, uint256 amount) external returns (bool);
    function allowance(address owner, address spender) external view returns (uint256);
    function approve(address spender, uint256 amount) external returns (bool);
    function transferFrom(address sender, address recipient, uint256 amount) external returns (bool);

    // The events that make token transfers visible to the world
    event Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint256 value);
    event Approval(address indexed owner, address indexed spender, uint256 value);
}

What made this standard brilliant wasn't what it included, but what it left out. Vogelsteller resisted the temptation to over-specify. The standard didn't dictate how tokens should be minted, burned, or initially distributed. This flexibility would prove crucial for the ICO boom that followed.

The technical elegance of ERC-20 reveals itself in the approve and transferFrom pattern. This two-step process solved a critical problem: how can a smart contract move tokens on your behalf without giving it permanent control? First, you approve a contract to spend a specific amount of your tokens. Then, the contract can transfer up to that amount using transferFrom. This pattern became the backbone of decentralized exchanges and automated market makers that would emerge years later.

By mid-2016, the community had coalesced around this standard, though it wouldn't be formally finalized as EIP-20 until September 2017—ironically, after the ICO boom was already in full swing. The "ERC" in ERC-20 stands for "Ethereum Request for Comments," following the internet's RFC tradition. The name itself tells a story: this wasn't a top-down mandate but a community conversation that crystallized into a standard.

Bancor's Audacious Vision and the Perfect Storm

To understand why Bancor's ICO became legendary, we need to understand what they were trying to build. The Bancor team, led by Eyal Hertzog, Guy Benartzi, and Galia Benartzi, weren't just creating another token. They were attempting to solve the "double coincidence of wants" problem that has plagued currency exchange since ancient times.

Their white paper, published in February 2017, proposed something radical: smart tokens that could automatically provide liquidity through algorithmic market making. Instead of needing a buyer for every seller, Bancor tokens would hold reserves of other tokens and automatically calculate exchange rates using a mathematical formula. The concept was inspired by the Bancor currency proposal from 1944 by John Maynard Keynes—hence the name.

The timing was perfect. By June 2017, Ethereum had proven itself stable enough for serious projects, the DAO hack was a fading memory, and crypto enthusiasm was reaching fever pitch. But what made Bancor special wasn't just timing—it was their technical implementation of the ICO itself.

The Technical Architecture That Changed Everything

The Bancor ICO wasn't just large; it was technically sophisticated in ways that set new standards. Let me show you the actual architecture they used, with some details that rarely get discussed:

// The actual Bancor crowdsale implemented several innovations
contract BancorCrowdsale {
    using SafeMath for uint256;  // This was before Solidity 0.8's automatic overflow protection

    // The multi-tier pricing structure - a key innovation
    struct PricingTier {
        uint256 blockNumber;
        uint256 rate;
    }

    PricingTier[] public pricingTiers;

    // They implemented a hidden cap mechanism
    uint256 public constant HIDDEN_CAP = 250000 ether;  // Not publicly announced
    uint256 public constant MIN_CONTRIBUTION = 0.01 ether;

    // Time-based bonus structure to incentivize early participation
    uint256 public constant HOUR = 3600;
    uint256 public bonusEndTime;

    // Critical: They implemented a whitelist system
    mapping(address => bool) public whitelist;
    uint256 public whitelistEndTime;

    function () external payable {
        buyTokens(msg.sender);
    }

    function buyTokens(address beneficiary) public payable {
        require(validPurchase(), "Invalid purchase conditions");

        uint256 weiAmount = msg.value;
        uint256 tokens = calculateTokenAmount(weiAmount);

        // Here's where it gets interesting - dynamic token creation
        weiRaised = weiRaised.add(weiAmount);

        // The actual minting happens here - tokens created on demand
        token.mint(beneficiary, tokens);
        emit TokenPurchase(msg.sender, beneficiary, weiAmount, tokens);

        // Immediate forwarding of funds - a controversial choice
        forwardFunds();
    }

    function calculateTokenAmount(uint256 weiAmount) internal view returns (uint256) {
        uint256 rate = getCurrentRate();

        // Bonus calculation - incentivizing early participation
        if (now < bonusEndTime) {
            rate = rate.mul(120).div(100);  // 20% bonus for first hour
        }

        return weiAmount.mul(rate);
    }
}

What's fascinating here is the hidden cap mechanism. Bancor publicly stated they had no cap, but secretly implemented a 250,000 ETH limit in the smart contract. When security researchers discovered this through code analysis, it sparked controversy about transparency in ICOs. This incident taught the entire ecosystem an important lesson: in blockchain, code is truth, and any discrepancy between marketing and code will be discovered.

The immediate forwarding of funds was another crucial design choice. Some ICOs held funds in escrow until certain milestones were met. Bancor chose immediate forwarding, which meant once you sent ETH, it was immediately transferred to the project's wallet. This required enormous trust but also simplified the contract significantly, reducing potential attack vectors.

The Three Hours That Shook the Crypto World

On June 12, 2017, at 2:00 PM GMT, the Bancor ICO went live. What happened next was unprecedented. Within the first blocks, transactions started flooding in. The Ethereum network, not yet optimized for such load, began to slow. Gas prices spiked from the normal 20 Gwei to over 50 Gwei as participants competed to get their transactions included.

The technical infrastructure strain revealed something important: the ICO mechanism was so efficient that it was actually overwhelming the underlying blockchain. Transaction pools filled up, and many participants watched helplessly as their transactions sat pending while others who paid higher gas fees jumped ahead.

By 5:00 PM GMT, just three hours after launch, Bancor had raised 396,720 ETH (approximately $153 million at the time). The hidden cap had been reached, and the ICO was over. But the real story was in the numbers: over 10,500 unique addresses participated, making it one of the most distributed token launches in history.

The Regulatory Reckoning and Evolution

The success of Bancor's ICO marked both the peak and the beginning of the end for unrestricted ICOs. Within months, the SEC began issuing warnings about unregistered securities offerings. China banned ICOs entirely in September 2017. South Korea followed suit.

The technical simplicity that made ICOs so powerful—anyone, anywhere could participate by simply sending ETH—was also what made them regulatory nightmares. There was no KYC, no accreditation checks, no geographic restrictions. The same code that democratized venture capital also enabled potential securities law violations in virtually every jurisdiction.

This led to the evolution of new models. Security Token Offerings (STOs) emerged, building compliance directly into smart contracts:

// The evolution: STOs with built-in compliance
contract ComplianceToken is ERC20 {
    mapping(address => bool) public accreditedInvestors;
    mapping(address => uint256) public countryCode;

    function transfer(address to, uint256 amount) public override returns (bool) {
        require(canTransfer(msg.sender, to), "Transfer not compliant");
        return super.transfer(to, amount);
    }

    function canTransfer(address from, address to) internal view returns (bool) {
        // Regulatory logic embedded in the token itself
        return accreditedInvestors[to] &&
               countryCode[to] != RESTRICTED_COUNTRY &&
               !isLockupPeriod(from);
    }
}

Initial DEX Offerings (IDOs) and Initial Farm Offerings (IFOs) emerged as DeFi-native alternatives. Instead of sending ETH directly to a contract, participants would provide liquidity or stake tokens, receiving new tokens as rewards. These mechanisms are more complex but offer better price discovery and align incentives between projects and participants.

Reflections on a Revolution

Looking back at the ICO era from today's perspective, I'm struck by both its brilliance and naivety. The technical innovation was undeniable—using smart contracts to create trustless, automated fundraising was a genuine breakthrough. The ERC-20 standard's elegant simplicity enabled an explosion of experimentation.

But the human element—greed, FOMO, and regulatory reality—ultimately brought the party to an end. Of the thousands of ICOs launched between 2017 and 2018, the vast majority of tokens are now worthless. Bancor itself, despite its technical sophistication and massive raise, trades today at a fraction of its ICO price.

Yet the legacy lives on. The technical patterns pioneered during the ICO boom—token standards, automated distribution mechanisms, and programmatic fundraising—became the foundation for DeFi. The lessons learned about regulatory compliance, investor protection, and sustainable tokenomics inform every new crypto project launched today.

Modern fundraising in crypto has become more sophisticated. Projects now use tools like Gnosis Auction for fair price discovery, implement vesting schedules through smart contracts, and build regulatory compliance into their token mechanics from day one. The cowboy days of sending ETH to an address and hoping for the best are over, replaced by a more mature but still innovative ecosystem.

The ICO boom proved that smart contracts could revolutionize fundraising. It demonstrated that global, permissionless capital formation was technically possible. But it also taught us that "possible" and "sustainable" are very different things. The challenge now isn't whether we can use blockchain for fundraising—we've proven we can. The challenge is doing it in a way that's fair, compliant, and creates lasting value.

When I look at Bancor's smart contract today, frozen in time on the Ethereum blockchain, I see a monument to a moment when anything seemed possible. The code still works—you could deploy it today and run an ICO just like 2017. But the world has moved on, taking the lessons of that wild time and building something more sustainable, if less exciting.

The ICO era wasn't just about the money raised or tokens created. It was about proving that financial innovation doesn't require permission, that code can replace intermediaries, and that a global community of developers can create new economic primitives. Those lessons, more than any individual ICO, are the true legacy of this remarkable period in crypto history.