Chainlink has officially joined the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Global Education Coalition to increase global awareness and understanding of blockchains, smart contracts, and oracle technology. As a member of UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition, Chainlink will make educational resources and development programs openly available and easily accessible to people and institutions around the world. This will enhance everyone’s underlying knowledge and skillsets, allowing them to properly apply blockchain technology and universally connected smart contracts to improve the lives of everyday citizens and strengthen social cohesion.
Chainlink is deploying educational and financial resources from its Community Grant Program to achieve these objectives, including creating educational materials and developer resources about how to build universally connected smart contracts, as well as awarding grants to high social impact projects and hosting multiple hackathons to incentivize developers all over the world to utilize universally connected smart contracts as a tool to create economic fairness.
Building Awareness Around the Power of Universally Connected Smart Contracts
Universally connected smart contracts are primed to redefine how society stores, records, and exchanges value, shifting away from centralized systems that are opaque and subject to counterparty risk and towards decentralized systems that have built-in mechanisms to ensure all stakeholders are equally represented. Enabling an economically fair and transparent system of contracts is the guiding vision of the Chainlink team and Chainlink’s explicit mission as an open-source, community-enabled, and shared global infrastructure.
Today’s shift in the infrastructure that powers digital value exchange using smart contracts is on par with the shift the Internet had on sharing digital information, hence why it’s critical to increase the ability for more people to actively apply it to their geographies’ unique problems. Incorporating a wider set of global voices will ensure that universally connected smart contracts better the lives of people from all walks of life all over the world, ultimately leading to more open, fair, and transparent economic systems.
For example, blockchains open up newfound capabilities for people to directly monetize their own data and services, and smart contracts give users unprecedented access to bank accounts, insurance, and other financial services to create critical financial inclusion.
The first step in this process is creating awareness about how to properly implement universally connected smart contracts, and spreading awareness requires carefully cultivated resources that are widely accessible to people across all parts of the globe. Knowledge is at the core of bringing about positive changes in society, and Chainlink is excited to work with UNESCO to expand the ability for individual developers, local communities, and large organizations to come together and successfully apply blockchain and smart contract technology to improve economic and social processes across multiple different industries and use cases.
Chainlink Education and Development Initiatives
As an active sponsor, research hub, and thought leader in the smart contract ecosystem, Chainlink will support UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition by providing accessible education resources, developer resources, and financial opportunities around smart contract development that have a significant social impact, enabling people of all levels and backgrounds to benefit from smart contracts.
Some of the current educational and development initiatives underway that will also be made available through our collaboration with UNESCO:
- Developer Tutorials – offer step-by-step guides on how to use key pieces of smart contract infrastructure, as well as how to build decentralized applications across various industries and blockchains, enabling more universally smart contracts for social good.
- Community Grant Program – award substantial financial resources to social good smart contract implementations, community contributors, integration teams, bug bounty fulfillers, and academic researchers who build key tooling and conduct innovative research that advances smart contracts and the Chainlink Network.
- Hackathons – give developers of all skill levels the opportunity to attend real-world and virtual events as a means of connecting with top blockchain projects and getting hands-on training with smart contract and oracle technology, creating an environment where social good smart contract implementations can be invented and implemented.
- Educational Blogs – provide a wide range of educational articles to accelerate the understanding and development around blockchain, smart contracts, and oracles, empowering developers all over the world to create societally impactful smart contracts.
Chainlink already collaborates with international organizations like the World Economic Forum towards advancing institutional understanding of smart contracts and will also support governments and organizations involved in the Coalition in exploring how smart contracts can be applied at the local, national, and international levels.
What’s Next
Chainlink is proud to join UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition and eager to advance awareness of universally connected smart contracts as a new form of digital agreement that, at scale, will help usher in a more economically fair world. We see our participation in the Coalition as another key step in achieving this vision. Explore our UNESCO member page to learn more about our objectives and action areas within the Coalition.
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