Level Three: Web3 Educational Case Studies is a repository of open source case studies to be used in University modules and courses. It begins with a case study of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocol Aave. This project is funded by the Aave Grants DAO. Later it will expand to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Layer 2 scaling solutions.
About the Project
Level Three will begin as an experiment in my classroom originally, but released on an open source licence here on GitHub for general use. The first case study will be an online document of on (DeFi) protocol Aave. Over time, I hope to expand the range of case studies until there is a comprehensive set of educational resources for the Web3 industry going forward. Currently no such resources exist.
The original Aave Web3 case study document will include the following sections:
History of Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
History of Aave.
What Aave’s product/s are.
How Aave is organised.
The case study starts in “DeFi Summer” 2020. Students are presented with the emergent conditions around yield farming and competitive token drops at the time. It explains how Aave successfully navigated this hyper-competitive environment, how Aave accomplished its progressive decentralisation and how Aave has expanded into areas such as decentralised social media with Lens. The case study includes a set of discussion questions toward the end that challenge them to imagine how Aave might evolve in the future, what products it might develop and what areas it might attempt to reinvent. The case uses Aave as a successful model students can emulate in order to prepare them for the Web3 industry (such as interviews, conferences, networking, etc.).
Projects Goals
The project's first milestone is a 3,000 word case study to be delivered on July 2023 on Aave. The timing here places me close to the first module I intend to test the case study in, MIS41220: The Ethereum Ecosystem. Students will earn an on-chain NFT or POAP for their participation. The case study will also include a number of videos that help contextualise the project, such as accounts of DeFi Summer by participants or hopefully employees of Aave discussing products.
In time, I intend to produce case studies on all the core areas of Web3. I consider the most pressing to be Ethereum (and Ethereum L2s), DAOs, NFTs, and the metaverse. If you have any ideas about additions do let me know!
About the Principal Investigator (PI)
My name is Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis (better known in Web3 as polarpunklabs). I am a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Management Information Systems (MIS) in the College of Business, University College Dublin. My research interests are Bitcoin, Ethereum, DAOs, DeFi and NFTs. I argue Crypto/Web3 is best understood as a form of cultural expression with associated micro-economies. To this end, I focus on the creativity of cryptocultures. I am a CoinDesk columnist, Ethereum.org contributor and a Founding Member of the Blockchain Association of Ireland. I created one of the earliest modules on cryptocurrencies in 2016 called MIS20060: Introduction to Cryptocurrencies and Web3 and the first module on Ethereum called MIS41220: The Ethereum Ecosystem internationally in 2021.
@polarpunklabs