Decrypt University

Why did we build this?

• Product Market Fit timing: Crypto educational courses were gaining traction on mainstream crypto projects.
• Decrypt had an established reputation for Educational articles
• Previous attempts to expand Decrypt's educational offerings had been unsuccessful due to unrealistic implementation strategies

What we set out to do.

• ↑ Accounts Creation
• ↑ Newsletter Subscriptions
• ↑ Ad & Partnerships Revenue
• ↑ Avg. page/session
• ↑ Time p/page
• ↑ Time p/session

To develop a comprehensive educational crypto product including: courses, articles, certificates, videos and gamification

I wrote a PRD (product requirements document) and a possible Product Roadmap that could help us build this with our given resources.

With a lean and realistic approach, the plan was to build the product throughout multiple iterations and taking into account our shortage of resources.

Development roadmap.

Discovery

Content Strategy & First Courses

"Start Course" Flow + Entry Points

Course Completion Certificate

V1 included certificates for courses. They would be stored in Decrypt's database/backend and at the same time exist as POAPS. This would be an initial approach for testing out the interest and traction.

Scaling & Farmers Issues

After implementing we encountered issues with scaling this models. As POAP team limited their POAP amount they could issue per event due to the increase amount of farmers.

Farmers are users or bots who just "farm" or collect NFTs without really caring about engaging with the projects or doing the work for getting an NFT. So they'll cheat their way to getting the NFT and their main goal is speculation regarding those assets. Due to this POAP started to give a lot less POAP per project which led us to start implementing our own NFT Certificates system.

• Required minimum time spent on each course article
• Linking Wallet to Decrypt account
• Course Quiz
• Verification Code before minting

NFT Certificates & Mint Page

After validating that the certificates idea worked with our user base, we needed a solution to overcome the farmers and POAP problem.

v2: NFT Certificates on Polygon

Our engineers started to brainstorm a solution to have our own NFT certificates on-chain that we could give to our users on course completion. Along with the whole product team we weighted pros and cons of different Ethereum L2. We had to take into account ease of implementation, transaction costs and availability and communication with their team. We finally went with Polygon

The NFT certificates was also a good chance for implementing the addition of a Crypto Wallet Login and a "wallets" section on user settings. This was a strategy shared with the broader website redesign project.

Course Quiz UX

We implemented quizzes for earning the certificates.

Feedback when failing the Quiz

To successfully pass the quiz 8/10 correct answers were needed. If the quiz is not passed, users can try again. Users are able to see which questions they have answered correctly or not. In the cases were answers were not correct, a hint in the direction of the correct answer will be provided. And in many cases links to content which they can read to find the answer.

Product Growth

As the product started to prove itself successful, and was consuming too much editorial resources, the company hired Euny Hong a specialised writer as Head of Educational Content to lead the content strategy for the product.

To boost engagement we prompted the users to take action and vote on the Educational material they want to read. Decrypt users with a registered wallet who owned NFT Certificates for course completion would be able to vote. Voting power would be relative to the amount of certificates in the wallet.

Another thing our Head of Educational Content did was to create a Glossary with all the relevant crypto vocabulary. Definitions in the glossary would often link to other Learn Articles and vice versa.

At the same time a partnership with the company Infura, led to the possibility of an ongoing series of short educational minutes which our new Head of Educational Content would script.

Arabic Version & MBC/Fananees Partnership

The positive numbers in terms of traffic, user accounts creation, newsletter subscription, and average time per session led to Decrypt's first partnership in the arab world.

We recreated the educational experience in Arabic with the huge Saudi media group MBC. The partnership also included the famous arabic cartoons Fananees.

Outcomes

We could say the project was overall successful as it helped boost crucial KPIs and helped secure new partnerships and open to new markets.