Coinbase Launches Program to Educate Users About Crypto ‘Beyond Bitcoin’

Major United States-based crypto wallet provider and exchange service Coinbase has launched an educational project that lets users earn cryptocurrency as they learn about it. The program, dubbed “Coinbase Earn,” was announced in an official blog post Dec. 19.

Coinbase Earn has launched in an invite-only mode, with an initial focus on one digital asset, the ERC-20 token 0x (ZRX). The central idea, the post outlines, “is for users to understand more about an asset’s utility and its underlying technology, while getting a bit of the asset to try out.”

Coinbase continues to explain that having conducted a survey among its customers and the wider public, it found that:

“[O]ne of the biggest barriers preventing people from exploring a new digital asset was a lack of knowledge about that asset. Many of the people we surveyed expressed a strong desire to begin learning about new and different crypto assets beyond Bitcoin, but didn’t know where to begin.”

The exchange proposes that solving the knowledge gap can thus both advance crypto education and widen market participation, with users earning small amounts of a given crypto as they complete educational tasks and amass knowledge.

While traditionally, Coinbase notes, users obtain crypto either through mining or purchases, the new educational scheme requires neither the computing power nor the upfront buying power that the other types of market entry require.

For the project’s first iteration, funding is reportedly coming from the the 0x external development pool, and the exchange states that, in future, it will experiment with other educational tasks devised by other parties — “not necessarily always created by asset developers themselves.”

As reported, ZRX has been listed on Coinbase’s professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro, as of mid-October.

Coinbase is not the only major crypto industry player to tackle education; earlier this month, rival crypto exchange Binance launched a collection of educational content comprising almost 500 articles in order to provide “unbiased” information about crypto and blockchain.

Also this fall, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Joseph Lubin’s ConsenSys — a blockchain startup and incubator — partnered with online education platform Coursera to offer a blockchain education program.

On the investment protection front, regulators across the globe — from China to the U.S. — are devising educational initiatives to better inform and protect market participants.

This summer, a group of Oxford University professors advanced with plans to not only educate the public about blockchain, but to use the technology as the very basis of a higher education institution.