Article credit to: https://blog.bitdegree.org/
Hi there!
As you probably know, I am the CEO of BitDegree. For the last months I’ve been massively busy with hiring advisors, sorting out our upcoming token sale, and organizing heaps of other exciting thi
ngs we will tell you about soon! But today I would like to share my story of BitDegree, how and why it happened.
Last 7 years I was working for Hostinger company as software engineer and later as product manager for its co-brand 000webhost. BitDegree story started from 000webhost and its community full of knowledge-thirsty users. 000webhost has a huge and active forum where users participate in discussions and help each other out with their web development questions.
One day, an idea came into my mind - why not build them a platform where they could learn and help them become the developers they want to be?
And that was the first step towards the BitDegree platform, we created a web fundamentals course. At that moment, we didn’t know how far this project would go.
In June 2017, whilst I was on a business trip to India with a colleague. A lot of people in India use 000webhost’s free web hosting services and the purpose of our trip was to find out why there is such a relatively low conversion rate to paid services amongst them. After a fortnight in India, it became clear — biggest part of people we met simply cannot afford to pay even for basic services. Paradoxically, many Indians enjoy access to the Internet thanks to public-private partnerships that subsidize devices and access to 4G via JioFi service.
It’s sad to say, but a good education in developing countries is a luxury, available only to the wealthy. For example, during our time in India, we discovered that a state school may have one teacher to 90 students. Therefore, the only way for a child to receive a good education in this situation is for their parents to work day-and-night to send them to a private school, and we saw that parents would be willing to spend a largest amount of their income on their child’s education.
Coming from Lithuania, a European country where we enjoy quality education mostly for free, and where 98 percent of the population has at least finished high school, this was hard for us to experience. Very hard.
As fate would have it, we were standing in Mumbai square when we received the news about the Basic Attention Token project raising 30 million USD in five minutes through its ICO. Amidst this sea of people, it became obvious that with 30 million USD, we could seriously revolutionize peoples’ lives by providing them with a good education.
And so BitDegree was born. We knew that for BitDegree to succeed, we needed a platform where students and teachers would be able to exchange their ideas and that free education would simply not be enough. We decided that we would make BitDegree unique from other online educational platforms by creating innovative online courses, and paying learners for studying them.
When we returned to Lithuania, we created a token-based economy model where students, instructors and employers interacted freely amongst themselves, and all of the middlemen — universities, banks, governmental institutions — were removed.
We will raise capital by holding a token sale, which begins on December 1st, 2017, with the aim of proving that it is possible to make education affordable for everyone anywhere in the world.
So, that’s the story of what BitDegree is about: changing the world through high quality, and truly affordable education. I’ll be honored if you are able to join me and my team on this journey!
Let’s build BitDegree together.
Andrius
