Open Campus’ EDU Chain goes live on Arbitrum, aiming to revolutionize education with blockchain

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Key Takeaways

Open Campus has launched EDU Chain on Arbitrum Orbit, aiming to enhance on-chain educational infrastructure.
The $EDU token serves multiple functions including being a gas, governance, and utility token in the ecosystem.

Open Campus, a decentralized education initiative backed by Animoca Brands and Binance Labs, has launched EDU Chain, a layer 3 blockchain on Arbitrum Orbit, designed to power educational applications and cultivate a thriving dApp ecosystem, the team shared on Friday.

Introducing @educhain_xyz — the L3 for education.

Bringing the $5 trillion education industry and 1.4 billion students and educators worldwide onchain.

Our mainnet is now live❕

Learn how you can join the EDU Chain movement 👇 pic.twitter.com/U3Pl67TZU9

— Open Campus (@opencampus_xyz) January 17, 2025

As an EVM-compatible chain built on Orbit, the platform inherits Arbitrum One’s security and infrastructure, while also drawing on Ethereum’s security and liquidity, and operating as an independent network.

EDU Chain features the Open Campus (OC) Achievement system (formerly Verifiable Credentials), enabling educational institutions and training centers to issue decentralized and tamper-proof academic records.

With OC Achievements, each learner has complete ownership and control over their own learning data, Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, also a board member of the EDU Foundation, said in a statement to Cointelegraph.

More than 100 decentralized applications are currently being developed on EDU Chain, spanning trading, learning, gaming, and earning categories, the project stated.

The $EDU token serves as the utility token in the EDU Chain ecosystem. $EDU holders can bridge and stake their tokens on the mainnet to earn rewards, according to Open Campus. EDU Chain has allocated 150 million $EDU tokens, representing 15% of the total supply, for mainnet rewards distributed through EDULand NFTs over three years.

The debut follows a testnet campaign that saw impressive activity, with 86.2 million transactions and 358,684 active wallets. EDU Chain has achieved a total value locked (TVL) of $162 million, according to L2Beat.

To further expand its ecosystem, Open Campus is hosting a hackathon series with a $1 million prize pool and a 12-week OC Incubator program, offering mentorship, funding, and support to winning projects.

The platform also kicked off the “Yuzu: First Harvest” campaign, which enables mainnet users to earn rewards by interacting with EDU Chain dApps during the first season.