Your academic genealogy, in your own hands.

About

WONK coin is a decentralized cryptocurrency blockchain for academic genealogy — the record of who taught whom, signed and verified by the people involved. Today that record is gated by private credentialing institutions - the universities. WONK puts academic genealogy into a trustworthy public ledger, so teachers and students can establish and manage their own academic lineage they way they see fit.

What it does

  • Genealogy without gatekeepers. Teachers and students record and manage their own academic lineage directly, rather than applying to and paying an institution to certify it.

  • Portable. The record follows the person, no matter where they studied or who they studied under. There is no need for institutional education if teachers and students agree to work outside their gates.

  • Tamper-proof. The immutable nature of public blockchains and cryptographic proof of work means that academic credentials cannot be fraudulently forged or retroactively injected into a person’s history.

  • Credentialing made redundant. When academic lineage is verifiable on its own, an institution’s watermarked paper is no longer the sole provider of truth.

People

Amos Bloomberg, Principal Investigator

Amos Bloomberg is Clinical Professor at New York University’s Courant School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science, where he focuses on education automation and software engineering. He is founder and director of the WONKledge Lab.