A gamified educational platform from Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) lets people earn non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by learning about blockchain technology in general and Stellar ($XLM) Network in particular.

Stellar is “an open-source network for currencies and payments”, and it “makes it possible to create, send and trade digital representations of all forms of money—dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything.” Stellar “relies on blockchain to keep the network in sync, but the end-user experience is more like cash—Stellar is much faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient than typical blockchain-based systems.”

Stellar network, which was launched in 2014, has “a native digital currency, the lumen, that’s required in small amounts for initializing accounts and making transactions.”

Here is one use case for Stellar:

You can create a digital representation of a U.S. dollar—on Stellar you’d call this a “dollar token”—and you can tell the world that whenever someone deposits a traditional dollar with you, you’ll issue them one of your new tokens. When someone brings that “dollar token” back to you, you promise to redeem it in turn for one of the regular dollars in that deposit account.

Essentially, you set up a 1:1 relationship between your digital token and a traditional dollar. Every one of your tokens out in the world is backed by an equivalent deposit. So while people hold the tokens, they can treat them just like traditional money, because they know that they’re exchangeable for traditional money in the end.

The original Stellar Quest platform, which was created by SDF ecosystem evangelist Tyler van der Hoeven and launched in October 2020, was aimed at developers and it featured live challenges (such as creating and funding a Stellar account). For completing each challenge, you would get awarded a badge and some $XLM tokens.

According to a blog post published by SDF on April 11, Stellar Quest Learn won’t function much differently than the existing Stellar Quest site,” and “you’ll still be able to play quests at any time, in any order.” With Stellar Quest Learn, “you can go at your own pace,” and finishing each quest “earns you a unique, fresh NFT badge (coming soon!) that you’ll be able to display, or boast about, in your Stellar Quest profile.” Five quests are available now, and SDF plans to “add new sets regularly.”

Users of Stellar Quest Learn earn NFTs by “completing modular quests that leverage Stellar’s API and SDKs”. They unlock and receive NFTs after each quest that they complete. They are also able to display their NFT badges in their Stellar Quest profile.

The SDF blog post went on to say that the existing Stellar Quest Live, “where quests are live and timed events that are hosted periodically,” will still be around:

We will continue to host live events periodically as a separate and supplemental experience to Learn. Face-off against other developers to solve new and unique timed challenges on the Stellar network.

As before, $XLM rewards will be available for completing live quest events.

In other words, the original Stellar Quest has been “split into two main components: Stellar Quest Live and Stellar Quest Learn.”

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.