The Next Education System Won’t Look Like One

From EDTech to ED3

To understand ED3, we have to stop thinking in terms of “education technology” and start thinking in terms of education infrastructure.

EdTech solved distribution. ED3 wants to solve ownership.
EdTech scaled classrooms. ED3 wants to dissolve them.

EdTech tends to recreate institutional logic in digital form. It builds platforms, courses, and dashboards that say: “Come here. Log in. Follow this curriculum. Then you’ll be learning.”

ED3, by contrast, challenges the premise that learning happens only within predefined environments. It treats open-source contribution, community curation, DAO governance, and protocol participation as valid learning experiences — and seeks to verify them rather than contain them.

This makes it deeply unsettling to incumbents. Because ED3 doesn’t want to improve the system. It wants to exit it.

The investor and former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan — himself a product of Stanford’s academic pipeline — once called degrees “a cartel.” A pointed criticism of how traditional institutions control access to opportunity. In his view, the credentialing system enforces exclusivity. It tells you who’s in, who’s out, and who gets to decide.

ED3 takes that gatekeeping logic and rejects it entirely. If Web3 questioned the need for banks, ED3 questions the need for permission to prove you’ve learned something. It doesn’t just want to decentralize education. It wants to decentralize legitimacy.

That statement (”Degrees are a cartel”) may sound provocative, but it’s not entirely wrong. The institutions that accredit learning also control access to funding, validation, and opportunity. They determine what counts. What doesn’t. And for whom.

ED3 challenges that by rebuilding the trust layer using verifiable credentials, decentralized identity, DAOs, and peer-based recognition — all without a central authority.

This might be signalling the ending the monopoly on legitimacy.

New Project and Shifts in How Skills Are Valued

TalentLayer lets workers build on-chain professional reputations that are portable, verified, and community-scored — not tied to LinkedIn endorsements or university logos.
Bankless Academy is turning onboarding into a public good — not a gated LMS, but a permissionless knowledge graph.
Rabbithole, before its pivot, let users prove skills through on-chain interaction — “do, don’t tell.”

Meanwhile, platforms like Gitcoin, Optimism, and ENS are funding education through quadratic funding, retroactive public goods, and community grants, bypassing traditional grantmaking.

This is a new mode of learning: self-directed, financially incentivized, peer-reviewed, and protocol-native.

But it’s not without tension.

ED3: Critiques from Within and Without

ED3’s ideals are big. But it’s bumping into some hard realities like:

• Signal overload: A world where everyone can issue credentials risks diluting value. If everything is a badge, what’s the badge worth?
• Plutocracy risk: Protocols that fund learning via token-based voting can replicate power imbalances. Are we replacing academic gatekeepers with whale wallets?
• Labor invisibility: Peer-to-peer learning is still labor. Who is paying the moderators, translators, reviewers?

Some critics argue that unless these systems build with intention, they’ll inherit the worst of Web2: extraction masked as empowerment, branding masked as identity, and “innovation” that forgets the learner.

This is where the design of infrastructure comes into discussion.

How SourceLess Technologies Align with ED3

Some of the core infrastructure being developed by SourceLess around identity, communication, AI, and networking already matches the kinds of tools ED3 systems are beginning to use.

• STR Domains can serve as persistent, self-owned digital identities. In an education context, they could anchor credentials, portfolios, and contributions that move with the learner — no institutional gatekeeping required.
• ARES AI, designed for multilingual and adaptive support, could evolve into a contextual learning assistant — helping people navigate knowledge, tools, and communities with identity-aware intelligence.
• SLNN Mesh creates access where traditional internet infrastructure doesn’t reach. In education, this means people in censored or under-connected areas could still participate in global learning networks.
• STR Talk offers secure, verified communication — which isn’t just useful for teaching, but also for managing peer groups, DAOs, or collaborative learning environments with identity built in.

These are not “education products.” They are infrastructure. And infrastructure only matters when it’s in the hands of people building new worlds not platforms trying to rent them.

ED3 shifts the focus to how knowledge moves between people, systems, and contexts without waiting for institutional approval.

Recognition, identity, and trust need infrastructure that travels with the learner. That’s where SourceLess Labs Foundation can contribute: by developing tools that quietly support this new foundation, without branding it or controlling it.