Harmony Web3 Pros Expert Track

Funding Proposals Grants
1

Name of Project

Exposing Harmony

Our Proposal to Harmony

We will run a 26-week educational marketing campaign with the aim of showcasing Harmony and its ecosystem to the future entrepreneurs, change-makers, and professionals of the Blockchain, web3, and digital assets space. This will put Harmony front of the mind for future projects, developments, and investments.

This marketing campaign will consist of the following:

  • Educating 200 Learners in our feature training program – Expert Track in Web3, Blockchain, and Digital assets. See below for more details on our Expert track. Harmony and its ecosystem and DApps will be featured in each section live class as case studies, examples, presentations, and discussions. (see below for more details on the Expert Track)

  • Integration of our eLearning platform with Harmony for the minting and issuing of Progress Completion Certificate NFT’s in our feature training.

  • All other awards relating to the Expert track will also be minted on Harmony

  • 10 Online Presentation webinars on Harmony ecosystem, showcasing Dapps and other services built on top of Harmony.

  • 5 1of1 Crypto art NFT giveaway contents minted on Harmony.

  • 2 In-person Meetups, 1 in London and 1 in Dublin, both with Harmony swag for attendees and speakers, with light refreshments provided.

  • Ideathon – We will pull all the great minds together that we have educated over the 26 weeks and host an Ideathon with a prize fund to take the most impactful ideas to the next stage.

  • Harmony will be listed as a partner on our website, and certificates of completion will be co-branded with the Harmony logo.

  • Node: As a partner, ABlockofCrypto will also host a node to support and increase the decentralization of the network.

  • ABlockOfCrypto will issue co-branded press releases on this partnership.

Proposal asks

26-week education marketing campaign $240,000

Metrics for success

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The Problem’s

There is an awareness of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and web3 but people don’t know what to do with it and don’t know how to use it.

Many that buy into cryptocurrency have a very limited understanding of blockchain and web3 technology and don’t know where to go to learn more.

Fuelled by open-source development allowing for deployment of products in a fraction of time, the rate of innovation in the web3 and blockchain space continues to accelerate.

Much focus from developers has been on “Copy paste” projects due to the speculative and volatile nature of the crypto market and the possibility of quick gains. This is reducing the focus and investment on real innovation in the space.

Innovation has been fast, yet quality training required to produce anything bar developers and cryptocurrency traders is not easily accessible and available. Education and training are key to adoption and the rise of new innovations and ideas.

Not all ideas and innovations will come from developers - We need more changemakers, entrepreneurs and other key roles educated in this space.

Those with existing skills are being snapped up by Fintech and others wanting to get in on the industry. This is leading to a shortage of skilled resources that should feed the adoption cycle as we move from Early adopters to Early Majority.

This skills shortage has also left development teams with little or no business teams, thereby putting strain on the demand for partnerships and slowing down ecosystem growth.

The current user base and those with Web3 literate skills are spread too thin and need to grow rapidly to sustain the growth of development.

Adoption can’t come fast enough.

The Solution

Build a community of educated talented web3 professionals and advocates. Through education and network growth, we will accelerate the rate of adoption in line with the speed of innovation by equipping people with the skills needed to become the marketing innovators, entrepreneurs, and business innovators that will take Web3 to mass adoption.

Our Mission

It is our mission to accelerate the adoption of Web3, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency Technology.

Our Aim

By providing quality education, we aim to create a Web3 literate community of innovators, entrepreneurs, professionals, and end-users ready to navigate, build on and champion the new economy and a decentralized future.

Our Feature Training Program - Expert Track in Web3, Blockchain, and Digital Assets.

We will provide World Class Training & a community for innovators, entrepreneurs, professionals, Cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and end-users.

Over 18 weeks Students will Learn about Web3, Blockchain, and Digital Assets whilst getting ready to navigate, build on and champion the new economy and a decentralized future in an interactive way.

Students will become blockchain and cryptocurrency literate. They will learn from experts in a guided interactive way and they will master the lingo and skills needed to succeed in the Blockchain, Web3, and Digital Asset space.

Using a blended learning approach, this Web3, Blockchain, and Digital Asset Expert track will have weekly live classes, live coaching sessions, self-study material, activities, and assignments. The live classes and coaching sessions will take the learning to a deeper level using case studies and discussions and make up a core component of the track.

Over 18 exciting weeks, students will learn about

  • Blockchain Technology

  • Ecosystems and Tokenomics

  • Cryptocurrency and Value

  • NFT’s and the Metaverse

  • Governance and DAO’S

  • DeFi

  • Web 3

  • Network, Communications, and Infrastructure

  • The Future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

This expert track is suitable for learners of all levels and is of particular interest to:

  • Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts

  • Financial and Legal Professionals

  • Gamers

  • Innovators and Entrepreneurs

  • Creators and Artists

  • Coders and Developers

Students will be awarded NFT’s as they progress through the track.

We will also have unique award NFT’s which will be given out thought-out the track and at the end. These will be for outstanding contributions in the community, and study group leaders.

A Certificate of completion is available once the student completes the necessary requirements and criteria.

Integration of E-learning platform with Harmony

Each section of this Expert track will have a progress completion certificate students can mint. There are 9 in total to mint. These NFT’s are unique to each block of students and will bring future benefits. Each one will have different benefits and learners must collect all 9 of them to get all the benefits. In addition to future benefits, these NFT’s also serve as certificates for skills completed in each section.

Students will be able to log into their web3 wallet and interact with the contract without leaving the course platform.

How Harmony will benefit from this marketing campaign

Brand Awareness, Adoption, Increased usage, network support.

Over the 26-week partnership, via the different educational events, online, in-person, and recorded sessions we will reach 100,000 people.

Ideathon awards will be favored for projects that will help grow and expand the Harmony ecosystem or improve the overall blockchain or web3 space. This will be sponsored by Harmony and is captured in the campaign ask.

We will be working with established artists for the 1of1 NFT giveaways, allowing them and their followers to explore what Harmony has to offer.

Our in-person meetups will bring a Harmony presence to Ireland and the UK.

Where we are now

+19K email subscribers

+1200 online meetup members

+450 registration of interest in the first expert track

Enrolment for first track opening Monday 14th.

First week (orientation week) starting 21st Feb

External links

Website https://www.ablockofcrypto.com/

Video from Orientation week Orientation welcome - YouTube

What help do we need?

It would be fantastic to get some Harmony experts and developers of Dapps and services to work with us on the 10 webinars. These need to be tailored in advance.

A message from the founder

Hi, my name is Paula and I thought it only right to give you some personal background as a partnership is an investment and most often, investments are about the people behind them.

The greatest gift I was given by my parents was the gift of Education. Born and raised in Ireland, I was lucky enough to go to college and study Applied Science. To do this, my parents had to sacrifice a lot as they needed to pay not only my college fee but also my accommodation and living expenses away from home. It must have been an awful kick in the face for them at first when I could not get a job in my field of study.

But having the ability to learn, and the enjoyment of college made me like education, and I would now consider myself a lifelong learner.

After my initial bout of education, I did not let the job situation get me down. It was not long before I switched fields and by profession and I have been a CPA accountant for many years.

In 2007 on the birth of my first child, I gave up my well-paid desk job to create a suite of e-learning courses on CD-ROM and start a home-based business on web2. These courses were aimed at accountants and professionals wishing to upskill in Microsoft Excel and Spreadsheets. E-learning was not even a thing.

In 2010 Udemy launched, killing the CD ROM market for education, making it impossible to compete with content delivered online. As Udemy was growing so fast I jumped on board and happily earned income from my online courses. However, in 2016 Udemy changed its policy. Instructor revenues got slashed and as instructors, we had no option but to comply or leave and try and complete alone.

In search of a fairer way for content creators in 2016, I turned to blockchain and have been an advocate for Web3 and the creator economy ever since. In 2018, pioneering the way for content creators, I tokenized my website and blog, offering Learn and Earn Activities for students. In 2020 when the world went into lockdown, I gathered the world’s greatest Excel Instructors and award winners, and we released a course raising $15K for charity. In 2020 and 2021 I won the Microsoft MVP award for my continued community involvement.

Now I am giving up my Career in Excel as I have a new mission. You can check out my old business website here and my Udemy profile here and my Youtube channel here

Let’s Discuss

If anyone would like to hop onto a quick video call to find out more and talk with me directly, just let me know and we will hook up.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for change/improvement to this proposal, please do comment below or send me a DM. I am looking forward to engaging with you all.

1 Like
2

Thank you for submitting a proposal to Harmony’s $300M Ecosystem Fund. Allow me to be your representative on behalf of the Grants committee. We are in the process of reviewing your proposal, however the team is heavily focused on delivering a great event at ETHDenver and the review process will take just a little longer than usual, until after the event.

If you have more details to add, please do so by replying to this thread. We would also love :blue_heart: to have the Harmony community participate to ask questions and provide feedback while the team is in Denver.

Thank you.

3

As a member of the Alpha Block, I’m looking forward eagerly to every session and soaking in all of the learning. Thank you, Paula!

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Hay @RonLevi and thanks for your support

5

Hi @HarmonyUniverse - I hope you are keeping well.

This proposal is based on our initial and first proposal, on which you can see the community feedback. It was suggested by @Jacksteroo that we circle back and so we now submit this as a revised more fleshed-out and detailed proposal.

Just a quick update, our first Expert track is live, the orientation is complete and the students are working through the first section of content. Feedback from the students, although it is so early, has been extremely positive and we are excited to be live and teaching.

I’m looking forward to your feedback and hope to hear back soon.

Paula

Initial proposal Education Partner - ABlockofCrypto

6

bumping up and tagging both @HarmonyUniverse and @Jacksteroo

7

@PaulaG it is great to see you here again! I remember your original proposal, and looks like you have gained quite a lot of traction. I think your mission is fantastic. I would like to gain a bit more clarification on the budget.

Can you break down each category a little deeper so I can understand your needs better?

For example, the Ideathon at $53.5K - what are the expected prizes? Will the ideas presented here be built on Harmony exclusively? Are there other costs that comprise this value? Will these be simply ideas, or treated more like a hackathon/accelerator program that can partially bootstrap the idea into existence?

2 events @ $14k: Who will be speaking? What topics will be covered? Will there be a call-to-action for the event (i.e. 1wallet downloads, promotion of Harmony’s grant program, etc)? Will the attendance be existing students, or the open to the entire community?

10 Online webinars @ $40K - what type of support will you need from devs to execute these? What comprises the $4k per webinar cost?

200 students @ $60K - can you detail this a little more for me as well? I would love to know elements make up the cost per student.

Finally, the title “Exposing Harmony” carries a negative connotation to it. Perhaps this was intentional on your part as a marketing angle, but renaming the course to something more neutral/positive would be advised (should we complete this partnership).

Thank you again for sharing the proposal. I look forward to sharing your response with our funding team and going from there!

Matty

3 Likes
8

Hi @Mattyontap and thank you for your reply. Exposing Harmony was intentional to grab the attention of the team and will by no means be the title of the main training course. It would be more like Harmony Web3 Pros Expert Track.

The budget outline shared was more based on a cash flow need and release of funds based on milestones rather than the actual budget. I attach a breakdown of the budget against the anticipated spend. Please note, we intend on locking up our contribution to profit in One to help secure the Harmony network,

budget

For the Ideathon, as we are training non-developers, the prizes will be to fund the idea into existence on Harmony and the prizes can be paid in One. However, we have not called it a Hackathon as this is most often associated with devs and we don’t want to scare people off. We would like someone from Harmony to help us Judge this.

2 Events. dependent on the timing, we would like to run these events alongside other larger events. For example Blockchain Ireland week is on the last week of May. Should we get approval in time, would schedule one of the events as a side event. The attendance would be open to everyone and we would run some focused marketing to attract people. You will see general marketing spending in the budget breakdown. Yes, we would have one or more call-to-actions. As for speakers and the topic, we have a separate budget (see below) to accommodate this. Obviously, it will be Harmony-focused.

Online webinars - we will be doing prizes at these, swag, and stuff. Along with a call to action. the aim of these is to showcase the Harmony ecosystem. So we would be looking for Dapp developers and owners to work with us on these. For example, in the section of NFT we would look to use let’s say Davinci as the case study and have someone from Davinci on with us. The call to action could be to mint and NFT, or to set up a profile. This is just for example’s sake and may not be the actual example, but the case study would be a Harmony application. Same with Defi and all the other topics we have.

the student cost breakdown is absorbed into the salaries and wages. Much time is spent on student outreach and let’s say hand-holding, reviewing assignments, and so forth. The cost of creating the core content and the course management and learning system has been back-ended. The cost of creating the smart contracts for harmony integration has not yet been spent and will depend on partnership approval.

This is a 26-week Educational Marketing Campaign, as you can see it’s rather full-on and it will be spread across Ireland, UK and Globally via the online events and course. It will require 100% focus from all of the staff but I feel this would be an exciting partnership for both of us.

I hope to hear back from you soon

Paula

2 Likes
9

Just bumping up for a follow up if possible @Mattyontap

10

Thank you for the well-written response, @PaulaG.

The budget is still very broad, which makes it more challenging to assess. For example, the marketing budget and ideathon prizes - being this vague it makes it difficult to assess ROI - as we prefer to utilize the majority of the funds to boostrap the best projects to deploy on Harmony. Now, we do see a need for your platform and mission…so I want to suggest several potential paths:

As a partnership - a per student, milestone-based investment is the more appropriate approach for Harmony. Jack had suggested this approach in your previous proposal - Education Partner - ABlockofCrypto - modeling after What is zku.ONE?.

Alternatively, you may format your education series as a DAO, similar to ZkDAO - zkDAO - providing training & basic income for ZK developers.

You can read more about our DAO funding guidelines here.

I can see A Block of Crypto being branded very well within the DAO guidelines, which may also provide more freedom for you. I know this is suggesting that you rewrite your proposal again, which I can understand would be a bit frustrating, but I hope that you will be able to utilize this updated info to take the next steps forward.

Matty

1 Like
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Hi @Mattyontap,

I had not seen the zkDAO application, thank you for the share. The initial model of zku to incentivize students did not suit as I have a need to pay staff. But the DAO option is amazing.

Please close off this proposal. I will happily submit a new proposal over the next few days and can for sure utilize the feedback. Maybe it will be the third time lucky.

Have a great day

Paula

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I am happy that we are making progress!! Very excited to see you submit a new proposal under the DAO guidelines

Matty

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Finally, we have submitted our DAO proposal @Mattyontap. it took more time than expected as we had some DAO tooling to work out along with selecting and onboarding governors. Hopefully this time we are on track. I look forward to the review. https://talk.harmony.one/t/a-block-of-crypto-dao-providing-education-basic-income-for-instructors-and-marketing-for-harmony

1 Like