Jan 7
Comparison to Play-to-Earn (P2E)
Table 1. P2E vs L2E
Clarity
Making a fun game is hard. Ask the founder of Slack. Gamers cannot articulate what they want, or what makes a game fun or not. On the other hand, solving educational pain points, test prep, or Q&A for students is extremely clear cut. Creating good problems and answering student questions is very black and white.
Persistence
Making a game fun over many years is even harder. How many people still play Farmville, Angry Birds, or Candy Crush? The half life of games is notoriously short. Education, on the other hand, will forever be a pain point.
⌛ Students will always have to take a test.
Even if test questions or admission requirements change, students will always have to take a test, perhaps in a different format but nonetheless a test. In India, the town Kota is dedicated for helping students prepare for competitive national engineering and medical college admissions exams. There is even a Netflix documentary about it.
Universality
Making a game fun for everyone is hard. Successful games must focus on a specific niche audience. Creating a game that both Chinese and Indian gamers will like is hard. But creating practice problems for Chinese tests and Indian tests is much easier. The pathway for localization is much easier and clearer.
👩🏻🎓 Not only will students always have to take a test, but every student will always have to take a test.
Necessity
Games are for entertainment, for fun. Games are not solving a real pain point for users. No one is playing Axie for the entertainment value. Everyone is in it purely for the earnings. In fact, there is very little overlap between players of say Warcraft with players of Axie Infinity (Play-to-earn). The “play” in “play-to-earn” is almost irrelevant.
⌛ Education is improving the long term earning potential of a person.
The “learn” in “learn-to-earn” is about long-term earnings, while the “earn” is about short-term earnings. We believe that the “learn” part of “learn-to-earn” is providing the same value proposition to users as the “earn”, just over different time frames.
Sustainability
The persistence, universality, and necessity of education/learning/testing as a student pain point means learn-to-earn is more enduring long-term. Games come and go. Social media apps come and go. But education is a basic human necessity.
The endurance of the “learning” pain point to students is what fundamentally will make the tokenomics of learn-to-earn sustainable long-term.
✅ Of all the potential “X-to-earn” models, learn-to-earn is the most enduring and sustainable long-term.
Further Readings
Read more about Learn-to-Earn in Aha White Paper.
