Tutellus ICO Review

The shortcomings of traditional educational models are well-known. Economic barriers are too high, knowledge evaluations methods are often too formal, and even those who manage to graduate often find themselves unprepared for the real-life job market. With that in mind, it’s time to talk about Tutellus, a company aiming to solve those problems by bringing blockchain into education.

Tutellus is far from being just another mysterious cryptocurrency startup. The company was founded in 2013, and is considered to be the largest online educational platform in Spanish-speaking countries, where it successfully competes with industry giants such as Coursera and Udemy. According to the Tutellus website, the platform offers over 130 000 video courses and is used by almost 1 million people from 160 countries.

The Tutellus team is currently preparing for the next major step: turning its entire platform to a blockchain-based ecosystem. By doing that, Tutellus hopes to become the first online educational platform being able to pay its users for studying: the more you study, the more money you get. Of course, teachers would still earn more, but the Tutellus founders believe that the opportunity to earn money while learning is an important incentive. Teachers will also be more motivated thanks to the platform’s efficient reward system.

Finally, the blockchain will allow the team to create an automated, truly unbiased ranking system that will help the best teachers to sell their courses at higher prices, while providing the most dedicated students with discounts, awards and even job offers from top-level employers.

The platform will use two different tokens: TUT and Smart TUT (STUT). The first, which is going to be distributed during the sale, will be used as the platform’s internal currency, and will interact with other platforms and currencies.

STUT, however, will not be directly tradable and will be granted to users as a measure of their participation. STUT tokens will be used to receive additional benefits in the long term, such as discounts or job matching.

The tokenization will also enable instant payment for teachers. At the moment, the standard withdrawal delay for the majority educational platforms ranges from 60 to 120 days - the hopes that increased reimbursement speed will help the platform attract the best talent.

If the project is successful, the TUT token holders will not only be able to trade them for profit, but also to access courses on the platform at a significant discount.

Overall score: Good

While ed-tech projects are relatively unusual for the crypto industry, Tutellus enjoys very high levels of community support on both Bitcointalk.org and Twitter, which is hardly surprising given the company's good reputation, especially among the Spanish audience. The only controversial issue was the platform’s sudden switch to NEM from Ethereum. Tutellus claims that it made the decision to avoid potential scaling problems, and this actually makes sense — we all remember how painfully slow the Ethereum network was at the peak of the CryptoKitties’ popularity.

Overall score: Great

The Tutellus team has an excellent technological and business background. CEO Miguel Caballero is an exemplary serial entrepreneur, known as the founder of Quoba, Neomedia and MET. The platform’s development is guided by CTO Javier Ortiz, who has 25 years of programming experience.

Eddy Travia, Miguel Solana, Oleg Poskotin, Yacine Terai, and Daniel Diez all act as advisors. All of them have experience working with blockchain-related projects, including the company’s legal advisor Rene Lauk, who also consults the Estonian Government.

Most team members do not have any significant experience in education, which normally would be a cause for concern. Tutellus, however, has earned a degree of trust, given the company‘s successful efforts in the sector over the past five years.

Overall score: Good

A great project with a good chance of success. The company aims to eliminate economic and social barriers to education, but its main competitive advantages lie with its user base, resources, and transparent business plan, as detailed in the whitepaper. The company plans to continue its focus on the Spanish-speaking audience, i.е. mainly on developing markets, which can potentially become a new growth engine for the world economy over the next few years.