Today, I have interviewed Miguel Caballero, CEO of Tutellus, on their ICO and future projects. Tutellus.io is a decentralized educational platform that pays users for learning. They were formerly known as Tutellus.com, a 6 year’s old company with a classical business model (where users pay for learning) and positioned as the leading P2P platform in the spanish speaking world, with 1 million users and 130,000 video courses. Tutellus.io is listed to organize a token sale in Q2–2018.

1) What problem are you solving, why do you need the blockchain technology and what are the main pillars that define your company and differentiate you from your competitors?

Traditional education is over: students are not motivated, teachers are badly paid and there’s a huge gap between employment and education, so we need new models “to fight” the status quo.

We need blockchain because we empower users -through relevance- and use this relevance (a tokenized measure of your knowledge in any skill) to decentralize governance. Users decide most of the things that happen in the platform.

Our competitors are in the traditional industry (they don’t pay users neither have their governance decentralized) or they are decentralized but don’t have base installed (they are starting from scratch). We have the best of both worlds: a decentralized governance and a big community (1 million users, 130,000 video courses and presence in 160 countries).

2) What value are you adding to your industry value chain and which are the main obstacles to the success of your solution?

We disrupt our industry because of the introduction of a new business model, so users (students, teachers and companies) start to use the services in a different way and close a value-added loop: the more I learn and the more I help other users to learn, the more money I earn.

Main obstacles are about user behavior and time to adapt the new platform: we are educating our community in blockchain, tokens and these kind of services to be able to use the new platform in a more efficient way.

3) Why did you decide to launch an ICO and why do you need a public Token Sale?

We have a clear mission: to reach 100 million people during the next 3 years and to improve their lives though education, getting them to earn money while they study. With our classical business model it’s something really hard to get, so we developed a new tokenomics model and a new platform (tutellus.io) to be able to do it. For that, we needed money.

4) How does your token function within the platform and why is it needed? How did you decide the total supply and distribution among stakeholders?

Out token (TUT) is used in a multiple way depending on the moment you are: as a crypto currency (to access courses), as a functional and exclusive system for teachers and companies (to access services), and as a governance system through our internal token, the STUT (the one that measures relevance).

We decided the tokenomics after studying our ecosystem and finding the way to create the maximum value for stakeholders.

5) Where do you see the value of your token in the medium to long term and the ultimate benefit for the token holders?

We see the TUT as a protocol for the educational industry: a token used to access learning products and services and a token being able to hold your relevance in the skills you want to boost.

6) Thinking about the future, what are your plans after ending the ICO? Are you afraid that the volatility of the cryptocurrency market might affect the economy of your project in any way?

We are working to have the token TUT deployed even before the ICO. We don’t think in the market, we think in the users and the pains we solve. Our goal is to create a tokenomic ecosystem the strong enough to hold tokens demand bigger than the offer: we have the content and the users, so let’s work to match offer with demand and to fix the pains detected.