Above all a college degree is a signal. People buy one to signal to the world – their parents, peers, employers, investors, co-workers – that they are a valuable, smart, skilled person worth working with. Yet the signalling power of the degree has been dropping fast. Ask any employer and they’ll tell you they have less and less trust in a degree to accurately signal a high-performing, value-creating person. They prefer experience and demonstrated proof of knowledge, but instead they are asked to simply trust a credential that’s supposed to verify knowledge and skill they can’t see for themselves. The whole system is based on trust, which is why it’s so vulnerable and ripe for innovation.
Why is Bitcoin a breakthrough? Because unlike all other methods of payment, it’s a trustless system. You don’t need to simply believe people and institutions, you can have demonstrated proof. It’s s platform for open, peer-to-peer verification.
That’s what we’re doing for credentialing at Praxis. The closed door, black box model asks everyone to trust universities and professors to accurately reflect knowledge and skill through tests, grades, and degrees, yet no one gets to actually see the process. We’re opening it up to the world. It doesn’t matter what your professor or institution thinks, it matters what the people who actually want to work with you think. Let’s let them in. Let’s let them give the grades. Let’s decentralize this thing.
We’re not trying to create new and better credential gatekeepers. We’re tearing off the gates. I describe what we’re doing and why in a bit more detail below.
You can also read and watch more about what we’re doing here.