Binance Launchpad sparks controversy: What are the standards? What are the reasons?

Apart from the controversy, Binance's Launchpad is also seen as a collaboration with Animoca Brands to create an education boom.

On the afternoon of the 21st, Binance announced that it would soon launch the Launchpad project Open Campus (EDU), which quickly sparked controversy.

It should be noted that Binance claims that Launchpad projects need to undergo a period of strict background checks before they go online, and the 30 Launchpad projects in the past basically have a good user base and popularity. In contrast, Open Campus can be said to have "come out of thin air", registering the official Twitter account and project domain name in March; and officially releasing the first tweet in April.

1. What is Open Campus?

According to the research report released by Binance, Open Campus is a Web3 education protocol that allows the community to create, own and promote the content they want to see in the world, and enables educators to earn income and be recognized for their contributions. On the one hand, the community can use blockchain technology to fund, co-own and learn educational content that suits their needs; on the other hand, creators obtain promotion services through publishers' NFTs, publish their content on Open Campus, and co-publishers can earn income based on their contributions; in addition, philanthropists can directly support education and track their donations on the chain through smart donations.

Open Campus is launching a scalable infrastructure to onboard a diverse ecosystem of adopters (schools, edtech companies, and other education providers) as a potential gateway to bring billions of educators and learners around the world into Web3:

On-ramp: Tokens will be introduced to users of Open Campus adopters (e.g. TinyTap) through various means such as wallets, tokens as payment methods, and discounts/incentives to drive adoption.

Publisher NFTs: Educational content can be tokenized as NFTs. Revenue generated by the content will be stored in smart contracts, and co-owners will be able to extract revenue based on their contributions (e.g., teachers who create content, publishers for marketing and localization).

Marketplace: Publisher NFTs issued by Open Campus adopters (such as TinyTap) can be bought and sold in EDU.

Smart Donations: Enable EDU grants and scholarships to be awarded based on measurable on-chain events.

In terms of data, the Open Campus project raised $6 million in a private token sale in 2022, accounting for 6% of the total supply of EDU tokens, with an FDV of approximately $100 million. As of April 21, 2023, the total supply of EDU is 1,000,000,000, and the circulation after listing is 145,000,000 (accounting for 14.5% of the total token supply).

It seems difficult to find the highlights of Open Campus in terms of both project concept and data. In response to the doubts, the official Twitter account of Open Campus also responded that "although the account is newly registered, it is not a new project."

Judging from Open Campus’ response and the revelations of many crypto professionals, the team behind Open Campus is actually TinyTap. Binance’s report also mentioned that the first adopter of the Open Campus protocol was TinyTap, and devoted a lot of space to introducing it.

TinyTap recently announced that it would use EDU tokens as the TinyTap platform tokens, which seems to confirm this speculation.

2. Binance Launchpad is accused of being a scam?

Compared to the sudden emergence of Open Campus, TinyTap has a certain number of years of development. Founded in 2012, it is a UGC education technology company that provides a no-code platform designed to enable educators to create and distribute interactive educational content while obtaining usage-based revenue shares.

On its official website, TinyTap claims to have the world's largest library of games created by educators for children aged 2 to 8, and the operating data disclosed by TinyTap is also quite impressive.

More importantly, TinyTap is a subsidiary of Animoca Brands. In June last year, Animoca Brands announced that it had acquired 80.45% of TinyTap's issued capital for $38.875 million in cash and stock. Animoca Brands currently holds 84.13% of TinyTap's shares.

Since then, Animoca Brands has also teamed up with TinyTap to launch education-related tokens Publisher NFTs. Animoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu also tweeted that educators can provide publishing rights for their courses through Publisher NFT and share the revenue of the platform subscription model, or promote Publisher NFT on other platforms, and they will receive up to 80% of the revenue generated by marketing and publishing work.

Earlier this year, Animoca Brands also helped 12 teachers on the TinyTap platform issue NFTs. Holders of these NFTs can enjoy dividends from the profits of the teachers' courses. At that time, the price of NFTs was above 10ETH.

It is worth mentioning that the day before Binance launched the Launchpad project Open Campus (EDU), The Sandbox announced a partnership with Open Campus to provide immersive education in Web3. At the same time, Open Campus will acquire LAND in The Sandbox to build a new educational theme area where users can unlock game tasks while completing courses.

Among the partners mentioned in the Binance report, Sandbox, Highstreet, Hooked, TinyTap, etc., are all projects under Animoca Brands or Binance Launchpad projects, and have close relationships. Because of this, Binance's operation is also regarded by many as "insider" and "setting up" behavior, which violates its fairness as a leading exchange.

In addition to user complaints, the project team also seems to have been complaining for a long time. Sui World, the community of Sui, a star public chain that is about to launch tokens, published an article titled "Why didn't SUI go on Binance (Launchpad)?" after the Binance Launchpad incident today, "accusing" Binance Launchpad of "unfair terms" around "Launchpad product rules, exclusive agreements, and prohibition of listing perpetual contracts for short selling."

3. Binance and Animoca Brands join forces to create an education boom?

Apart from the controversy, Binance's Launchpad is also seen as a collaboration with Animoca Brands to create an education boom.

Earlier this year, Zhao Changpeng announced the three key directions of Binance's 2023 plan, with education at the top. Crypto researcher @jason_chen998 analyzed, "The essence of an exchange is actually a traffic business. Exchanges are the most urgent to attract the next billion people to enter. The popularization of Web3 education is an important channel for exchanges to source business."

As mentioned above, TinyTap, the company behind Open Campus, has been operating since 2012 and not only has complete products but also a solid user base. As to why TinyTap needs to use a new project called "Open Campus", @jason_chen998 pointed out that it may be because TinyTap's products are aimed at the sensitive age group of 2-8 years old.

Binance's efforts in education have made many crypto investors start to pay attention to the education sector. Education may become an important trend in Web3 this year that cannot be ignored.