Nowadays, the payment for knowledge has become more acceptable by the public, and people are more willing to pay to these truly insightful, cuttting edge, and well-stuctured knowledge or curriculum. However, current centalized video content production platforms (like YouTube, Udemy, etc.) take too much profits from the content producers (resaech have shown that content creators usually only receive 15% of the values their contents create) and the values generated from the video are not distributed in a timely manner. In order to tackle this unfair value distribution, we have this decentralized platform EDU.IO where the video contents will be backed by their digital assets as an NFT (copyright protection!) and fractionalized as tokens, and it creates direct connections between content creators and viewers/fans (no middlemen anymore!), maximizing the value of the contents made by creators.
EDU.IO is a decentralized educational video streaming media platform & fractionalized NFT exchange that empowers creator economy and redefines knowledge value distribution via smart contracts.
- As an educational hub, EDU.IO is a decentralized platform of high-quality educational videos on dircuptive innovations and hop topics like metaverse, 5G, IoT, etc.
- As a booster of creator economy, once a creator uploads an video (or course series), it will be mint as an NFT (with copyright protection) and fractionalizes to multiple tokens. Our platform will conduct a mini-IPO for the each content they produced - bid for fractionalized NFTs. The value of each video token is determined by the number of views over a certain time interval, and token owners (can be both creators and viewers/fans/investors) can advertise the contents they owned to increase it values, and trade these tokens to earn monkey or make other investments.
- By the end of the week, the value generated by each video NFT will be distributed via smart contracts to the copyright / fractionalized NFT owners of each video. Overall we’re hoping to build an ecosystem with more engagement between viewers and content creators, and our three main target users are:
-
- Instructors or Content creators: where the video contents can get copyright protection via NFT, and they can get fairer value distribution and more liquidity compare to using large centralized platforms
-
- Fans or Content Viewers: where they can directly interact and support content creators, and the fee will be sent directly to the copyright owners via smart contract.
-
- Investors: Lower barrier of investment, where everyone can only to a fragment of a content. People can also to bid or trading as a secondary market.
- Frontend in HTML, CSS, SCSS, Less, React.JS
- Backend in Express.JS, Node.JS
- ELUV.IO for minting video NFTs (eth-based) and for playing quick streaming videos with high quality & low latency
- CockroachDB (a distributed SQL DB) for storing structured user information (name, email, account, password, transactions, balance, etc.)
- IPFS & Filecoin (distributed protocol & data storage) for storing video/course previews (decentralization & anti-censorship)
- Transition from design to code
- CockroachDB has an extensive & complicated setup, which requires other extensions and stacks (like Docker) during the set up phase which caused a lot of problems locally on different computers.
- IPFS initially had set up errors as we had no access to the given ports → we modified the original access files to access different ports to get access.
- Error in Eluv.io’s documentation, but the Eluv.io mentor was very supportive :)
- Merging process was difficult when we attempted to put all the features (Frontend, IPFS+Filecoin, CockroachDB, Eluv.io) into one ultimate full-stack project as we worked separately and locally
- Sometimes we found the documentation hard to read and understand - in a lot of problems we encountered, the doc/forum says DO this rather then RUN this, where the guidance are not specific enough and we had to spend a lot of extra time researching & debugging. Also since not a lot of people are familiar with the API therefore it was hard to find exactly issues we faced. Of course, the staff are very helpful and solved a lot of problems for us :)
- Our Idea! Creative, unique, revolutionary. DeFi + Education + Creator Economy
- Learned new technologies like IPFS, Filecoin, ELUV.IO, CockroachDB in one day
- Successful integration of each members work into one big full-stack project
- More in depth knowledge of Cryptocurrency, IPFS, NFT
- Different APIs and their functionalities (strengths and weaknesses)
- How to combine different subparts with different functionalities into a single application in a project
- Learned how to communicate efficiently with team members whenever there is a misunderstanding or difference in opinion
- Make sure we know what is going on within the project through active communications so that when we detect a potential problem, we solve it right away instead of wait until it produces more problems
- Different hashing methods that are currently popular in “crypto world” such as multihash with cid, IPFS’s own hashing system, etc. All of which are beyond our only knowledge of SHA-256
- The awesomeness of NFT fragmentation, we believe it has great potential in the future
- Learned the concept of a decentralized database which is directly opposite the current data bank structure that most of the world is using
- Implement NFT Fragmentation (fractionalized tokens)
- Improve the trading and secondary market by adding more feature like more graphs
- Smart contract development in solidity for value distribution based on the fractionalized tokens people owned
- Formulation of more complete rules and regulations - The current trading prices of fractionalized tokens are based on auction transactions, and eventually we hope it can become a free secondary market (just as the stock market)