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 writing down.
The Market We Haven't Touched
We've decentralized money (Bitcoin), computation (Ethereum), storage (Filecoin), and even social networks (Steemit). 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.
Why Education Is Broken (And Not in the Way You Think)
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 Illusion of Educational Markets
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 Fraud That No One Talks About
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 Elephant in the Room
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.
What If Teachers Were 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?
How Incentives Would Shift
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.
Letting the Market Set Prices
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.
Employers as Truth-Tellers
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.
Opening Doors That Are Currently Locked
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 I Haven't Solved
Let me be transparent about the challenges I'm still grappling with. The collusion problem: what stops educators and students from creating fake employment contracts? My 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.
Starting Small
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.
Why I'm Writing This Down
This isn't a whitepaper or a project announcement. I don't have the resources to build this, and I'm not sure anyone does right now. The technology is mostly there, but the coordination problem—getting educators, students, and employers to adopt a new system simultaneously—is immense.
But ideas have a way of persisting. Someone once thought about decentralized money long before the infrastructure existed to make it work. Maybe this idea, too, is early. Maybe decades from now, when the primitives have matured and the culture has shifted, someone will stumble upon these thoughts and find them useful.
So I'm writing it down. Not as a call to action, but as a record. A note to whoever might pick this up later: here's where my thinking got to. Here are the problems I couldn't solve. Maybe you can take it further.