Digital Sovereignty: Teaching Web3 to Tomorrow's Builders

The future belongs to those who can build it, not just use it—and that's the powerful premise behind our latest Tech Talk podcast episode on educating the next generation about Web3. When we discovered that over 400 million people unknowingly use blockchain applications while 99% of schools teach technology like it's 2005, we knew something had to change.

What exactly is Web3? It's not just crypto jargon or technical complexity—it's fundamentally about ownership. Instead of surrendering your data to corporations and juggling dozens of passwords, Web3 gives you one wallet, one identity, and full control over your digital life. It's the difference between renting and owning your online presence. This shift impacts everyone from artists and teachers to future product managers and community leaders.

The exciting announcement at the heart of this episode is the launch of our comprehensive Web3 Digital Identity Curriculum—an eight-week course designed for STEM schools, charter schools, and vocational programs. This isn't theory or hype, but a practical, hands-on program covering blockchain fundamentals, Web3 wallets, NFTs, on-chain credentialing, and digital sovereignty principles. We're launching with a pilot cohort of 10 students who'll not only become our first certified graduates but will receive a $100 USDC "reverse scholarship" for their participation and feedback. The curriculum is non-biased and focuses on the core principles that will prepare students for a blockchain-powered future.

 The next Steve Jobs won't be in a boardroom—they'll be in a DAO with an ENS name and a blockchain resume. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Tech Talk Podcast
• 3:14 Bitcoin Pizza Day Celebration
• 5:22 DomainXBT Tool and Registry Updates
• 7:20 Web3 Education: The Missing Classroom Component
• 10:49 Simplifying Web3 for Newcomers
• 12:03 Future Jobs Requiring Blockchain Knowledge
• 14:01 Introducing Web3 Digital Identity Curriculum
• 17:18 Pilot Program and Reverse Scholarship
• 19:07 Call for Industry Leaders and Conclusion

Transcript

Speaker 2: 2:37

Thank you. Thank you, gm, gm, and welcome to our Tech Talk podcast. This is a live discussion we record weekly here on X where we highlight news, innovation, education, alpha and business development in the Web3 technology and digital identity space. I'm your host, marcus aka Wynn Airdrop, founder of iHeart Domains and community manager at Freename resource for unbiased Web3 domain and blockchain-based educational content, with over 100 Tech Talk episodes and YouTube videos produced and archived over the past two and a half years. You can search our entire archive for prior recordings and an easy-to-read blog overview of each episode at iHeartDomainscom. Also, all prior recordings are available in podcast form on every major podcast player, including Apple Podcasts, spotify and iHeartRadio, and that's easily reachable at techtalkhost.

Speaker 2: 3:31

To start off with a little bit of opening news, our topic for today is actually educating our future generations. I'm very excited to get into the main topic and also into a very big announcement. But back to the opening news. I've actually pinned a few things up at the top. One of the first things in the opening news is yesterday was Bitcoin Pizza Day. Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day to everybody who collectively celebrated across the world. Yesterday. We participated as part of the global pizza party that is hosted by PizzaDAO. We did ours here in San Antonio. We had a small gathering of friends, you know, talked about Bitcoin, right, talked about blockchain, web3, and we talked a little bit about some of the subject that I'm gonna be talking about today. But for those of you who aren't familiar with Bitcoin Pizza Day, it is a day that we have begun celebrating. There's a global party or initiative to throw a global party each year to celebrate the day. I believe it was 15 years ago or so, or something close to that, that a gentleman purchased two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin. At the time that he purchased the pizzas, those 10,000 Bitcoin were worth approximately $18. As of yesterday, which, coincidentally, was Bitcoin's all-time high, those pizzas would have cost $1.1 billion. So, yeah, every single year, yeah, collectively, across the globe, we collectively come together to basically roast the guy who wasted $1.1 billion on two pizzas. So yeah, happy Bitcoin pizza day to everybody. We celebrated ours last night. It was a great evening. I got a chance to see the live stream of everybody else celebrating from different parts of the globe and, yeah, super cool experience Looking forward to next year.

Speaker 2: 5:21

Second thing I wanted to bring up and mention and re-remind everybody we have built our own domain or tool called DomainXBT. I've talked about it quite often. Domainxbt exists not only as a chat GPT custom agent that you can talk to ask to help you build things, et cetera, but it is also now live on X from its own X profile. If you see it tweeting, auto-tweeting, anything like that, you can actually now interact with DomainXBT so you can ask it questions and it will answer you, and more features are to come. Again, I've made a commitment to continue to explore AI and what I can do to incorporate AI into, you know, not only iHeart domains but into general outreach for Web3 digital identity. And so DomainXBT is live and it's doing its thing. So, again, if you're looking for either Web2 or Web3 appraisals, if you're looking for any tools or tips or strategies to help build your portfolios or even build out websites and landing pages for any of your domains, you are free to use DomainXBT. It is a free tool, again on ChatGPT, or you can interact with it directly here on X and you can follow it at domain underscore XBT right here on X. And then, lastly, as always, our registrations are open for dgen, exchain and defi wallet. You can easily reach our registry at iheartdomainscom. If you're looking for an awesome Web3 digital identity to get started that will have future benefits and, trust me, they will have some future benefits. Go ahead and grab your Grail domain early on dot dgen, dot xchain and dot defi wallet and again, you can find the links to register any of those names at iheartdomainscom. Those are forever domains, so if you register a domain for as low as $5, you do own it forever. There are no renewals and you can mint it to one of any of eight blockchains. All righty, all righty.

Speaker 2: 7:16

Now let's get into the main discussion Again. Looking at the top, you can see the title is Educating Our Future Generations. Once again, I do want to welcome everybody to our Tech Talk podcast where we break down the future of Web3 identity so that you can build it today Again. Today's episode is big, it's bold and I think it is long overdue. We're talking about something that affects every parent, every student, every school and every entrepreneur. Why Web3 must become a permanent part of the classroom. Not a quick workshop, not a guest speaker once a year, not that crypto thing you hope your kid figures out later. I mean real, integrated, future-ready education.

Speaker 2: 8:04

Here's a quick stat, and this is the stat I found, Whether it's true or not, I don't know, but the stat says that over 400 million people now use blockchain-powered apps in some form, and most of them don't even know it, and this is how I've always predicted. Instead, that most people will get onboarded into Web3 is through an app that introduces them through a way that isn't crypto, but in an event, these things still have to be developed. 99% of schools today they're still teaching this blockchain tech like it's 2005. It's like training pilots with bicycles it's outdated and it's unfair. It's like training pilots with bicycles it's outdated and it's unfair.

Speaker 2: 8:41

The world is obviously moving to decentralized platforms and dApps, wallet-based logins, on-chain identities, digital credentials and even token economies, and if we don't teach our kids about this now, we're setting them up to merely be users and not builders, to consume the future and not to create it. So, before we go further, a lot of people listen to this podcast that I assume could potentially be outside of the space, maybe hearing what is this Web3 thing right? What is this really? So, before I go any further, I do want to simplify Web3 for anybody who listens to this in the future. Web3 is basically the next version of the internet and it's the version where you will own your identity, your data and your assets. Instead of logging into 50 websites with your email or handing over all of your personal info or clicking I forgot my password every other week, web3 gives you one wallet, one identity, it gives you full control over that data and it gives you direct access to apps and opportunities. It's like moving from renting your life to owning it. And the best part is that, despite the misconceptions, this isn't just useful for coders and crypto bros. This is extremely useful for artists, for designers, for musicians, for teachers, doctors, hr managers literally anyone who touches tech aka all of us.

Speaker 2: 10:09

Now I want to kind of touch back on schools for a second, right now again, as I said before, web3 kind of gets treated like a guest star. It's like oh, wow, cool, let's do this blockchain workshop, but then one hour later, everyone gets a free sticker or an airdrop, goes home and forgets it ever happened. But that it's just simply not enough. It's not breaking through. We don't teach math or any other fundamental skills with a guest speaker. We don't teach internet safety once a year in a hallway. So why are we letting the tech that's supposed to be reshaping the entire world be treated like an afterthought, like let's, let's paint this picture, and this is a real picture that I got a chance to paint a little bit during, you know, the pizza day yesterday.

Speaker 2: 10:55

This is an interesting conversation and I'm glad I got to show this in person to the future generations of who I'm talking about. But look at this picture In the next five years from now. Not even from the next five years, like right now. There are literally sites that have new careers, and more careers every single day are popping up extremely fast. That requires some sort of blockchain-based knowledge. You're going to start seeing jobs like Web3 product manager or DAO community lead or token analyst or something like that. But even classic jobs like marketing and HR will need to understand at some point how wallets work. At some point in the future, you're going to have to understand what gas fees are, what it may mean to sign a transaction or how to verify somebody's resume or identity on chain. If your resume in the future says proficient in Microsoft Word, you're not future-proof. This isn't sci-fi, this is something that is already happening.

Speaker 2: 11:55

Now let me transition into the big news that I left out until now, and this is where we intend to take our step and make our mark. We're done talking about just about how schools should teach the blockchain what we've done here at iHeart Domains. We've created a way to show them I'm extremely thrilled, and you can see pinned at the top of the space to announce my latest baby, what I've been working on for quite some time, and this is our Web3 Digital Identity Curriculum. Intended to be a groundbreaking classroom-ready course, it is designed for STEM schools, for charter schools and for vocational training programs, and it is designed to help bring the next generation into the world of Web3 and blockchain. This isn't theory, this isn't hype. This is a real course that will help prepare students for a real decentralized future.

Speaker 2: 12:50

As you can see in the pin post at the top, this is a fully it's the full curriculum, so it is an eight-week course. These are broken into different modules. These modules cover again Web3, web3, digital Identity and blockchain from front to back. Although the title of the curriculum itself, and although kind of the overall focus or theme of the curriculum is based on digital identity, it literally covers a lot. It's a lot of fundamentals that you have to learn about blockchain and Web3. To understand how domains work, such as Web3 wallets, you need to understand NFTs and how ownership works on the blockchain. On-chain credentialing, how to interact and log into dApps. Also, blockchain verified certificates and other credentials that are again again stamped by ownership of your wallet. All of these things are things that we will cover throughout this curriculum Other naming systems, how traditional DNS works, what digital identity means, both off-chain and on-chain.

Speaker 2: 13:51

To paint an entire picture not only of how to interact in Web3, but what the importance of Web3 is to begin with, right, what pain points does it solve? How does it help protect your future? How does it help protect your identity? How does it create a better, secure bridge for you to become monetized or to send and receive income? How does it create self-sovereignty? These are the things that we'll go through again at the school level, where people will absorb it most before they enter into the world as consumers, before they are forced only to interact rather than build this entire.

Speaker 2: 14:28

This curriculum combines, again, live instruction, interactive tooling and hands-on projects to give students the skills needed, uh, to again progress into whatever other field or course of store, course of study enters the most, or their specific niche on the blockchain, one of the things that we're doing, and so another thing that I mentioned up at the top, and this is where the community that we've built and we've interacted here with here on X for the past couple years comes into play. We're actually going to kick off our curriculum with a one-time pilot cohort, so we're doing a sample class. This will be the first class before we release this publicly or start pitching this publicly to institutions. This will be a one-time 10 student class, hand-picked and hand-selected for volunteers from our Web 3.0 Native community. This group will essentially test drive the program. They'll give feedback to battle test the course and they'll also become the first certified graduates of this new educational curriculum.

Speaker 2: 15:33

Now here's the kicker. I know that people at Web 3 like to be incentivized. No one likes to do anything for free and it's extremely valuable feedback that we are receiving in return for you completing the course. So, again, as we recruit this class of 10 students and this team, students do need to dedicate to completing the entire course. Once they graduate, each student will receive what's called a reverse scholarship, which will be a reward of $100 USDC in addition to their on-chain certificate for completing this course and for giving us feedback. Because, again, every single interaction, every feedback, all of this will help shape this program to be more successful once it does enter into the school system and then, after this pilot, the plan is again to scale. To take the example, take the recording of this curriculum and begin to use it to demonstrate this to different schools across the nation, to any school that needs this curriculum, to any business that wants to teach blockchain or Web3 identity to their workforce. Wherever the next builders are is where we would like this curriculum to be, and we would also like to encourage anyone else who is a specialist in your field to start looking at education in the same way that we are looking at it as well, and this is going to take a collective effort.

Speaker 2: 16:51

Again, we speak of education in almost every space that I've been on since I've been in Web 3. I think education gets brought up in every single one of them, and I don't know exactly what people mean or are speaking of when they say it, but you know, kind of looking at what's been produced after those conversations, I'm assuming that people think that education is simply just reading something or telling something about something, or just showing them one time how to log into something, but again, as I said, that's not the type of education that sticks and it only helps really the user base right, the people that are coming into the space as users. You're only educating them to get through it. The age group the period to start penetrating, to really get this into the hands of people who will build the next generation of apps, is to start getting this in the schools. And so we, as educators anybody in whichever field that you're in you know, in this case I'm in digital identity, if you're in AI, if you're in building DApps or launching tokens or NFTs or community building let's start collectively thinking how we can create different curriculum and courses that we can start introducing at the grade school level or the high school level, so that now, when the next generation of students does exit school and enters the workforce or enters into the consumer force, we don't have so much of an uphill battle explaining the benefits and the value of blockchain, and that's not only for us, but them as well. You know most.

Speaker 2: 18:21

There's a lot of very lucrative careers that currently exist. That, again, they're very blockchain focused. They're for new up and coming companies that are focused completely on blockchain, and there's nowhere for students to currently go to educate themselves. There is no degree program that currently exists for blockchain. So how do we create that bridge, or bridge that gap between the education needed to bring in the next group of builders to help continue to grow these projects, and our workforce that doesn't know anything about it?

Speaker 2: 18:51

And again, it's up to us, those of us who are KOLs, those of us who are industry leaders, those of us who have built these platforms, to create the curriculum ourselves and then start introducing it and implementing it ourselves. And so, in the spirit of, you know, being the best example that I possibly can be, we've created this curriculum on our own, to be a shining light and to be one of the first of our kind to start spearheading this initiative. So, again, I humbly ask any of the people in our community doesn't matter what naming service you're from again and that's another thing too, I do want to put that out there that this is a non-biased course. This course is truly intended to teach the fundamentals of blockchain and digital identity, and it teaches it from all angles.

Speaker 2: 19:40

It touches on all naming services, all the ones that are relevant to this particular course, and it touches on everything from a value perspective. None of this competition or one name service is better than the other, or any of that narrative is being sewn into this curriculum. So, no matter what naming service you're extremely bullish on, again I ask for your support to not only hype this up and to start creating, you know, some buzz around this, so that makes it, you know, a lot easier for schools to receive this. But also, if you want to participate in the cohort, again, we are going to have a public onboarding and selection process that gets announced here in the next few weeks, where you can enroll right If you want to go through this course, if you want to, you know, perfect your knowledge on Web3 digital identity and have a certificate to show at the end of it. We would love for anybody that can commit to going through this program and providing some feedback to help us do so. So, again, how do we prepare the next generation for a future that they may possibly already live in? We just answered it right by building something real, by building something teachable and tangible.

Speaker 2: 20:50

Our Web3 digital identity curriculum isn't just a lesson plan, it's a movement. It's about putting ownership and knowledge in the hands of the student. It's about teaching sovereignty and about teaching decentralization in the classroom, and it's the start of an education that finally matches the speed of the innovation that we are currently pushing forth right now on Web3. If you're an educator, if you're a founder, a parent or a student, this is really your moment to help us build and help us grow in the space. Again, this is another invitation for you to join the pilot, to partner with us or even maybe sponsor or recommend a future builder to join the curriculum itself as well.

Speaker 2: 21:31

The next Steve Jobs won't be in a boardroom. He'll be in a DAO with an ENS name and a blockchain resume. We need to start preparing our space for that. We're not just imagining that future. We're currently onboarding it. Remember to always focus on your mission and not your conditions. And again, hopefully this helped lock in the importance of educating our future generation, and I look forward to playing our part in educating the future with our Web3 Digital Identity Curriculum. Remember to always focus on your mission and not your condition. Thank you for listening to our Tech Talk. I'll see you guys later on chain.