The IE Business School is a well-known business school in Spain and its has launched a pilot programmer recently based on the blockchain technology and the cryptocurrencies. The idea is to experiment during class with the creation of value from zero in a tokenized economy. For this purpose, the school created and emitted 2.4 million tokens called #IETokens, a native cryptocurrency to be used in class by the students of the Startup Lab of their International MBA programme. The goal of the lab is to train and guide the participants in order to start their own businesses.
Asier Arranz, a professor in charge of the new initiative, believes that all the business students should have at least basic knowledge about the blockchain technology and the cryptocurrencies and be familiar with the emerging tokenized economy. In an interview from Medium, the professor explained the experiment with their own cryptocurrency. He decided to create a cryptocurrency to be used for internal purposes and give 70% of all the tokens to 168 students, which means that each student got 10,000 tokens.
Professor Arranz designed the following experiment: when the first of his five courses started, he was asked the question he was waiting for: “Professor, do these tokens have any value?” The teacher showed them a one euro coin and offered it to anyone who would give him 10% of their coins. Nobody responded. The professor raised the offer to 10 euros and then to 20 euros, still without success. This was repeated until one student finally sold him 1,000 tokens for a little more than 30 euros. The biggest surprise and lesson for the students was that this first transaction gave value to the rest of the tokens. Suddenly, all the students started thinking they had 320 dollars worth of tokens on their accounts. The entire project now had a value of 91,680 dollars, created from zero in one minute.
Later on, the offer and demand did its thing. From 0.005 waves for one IEToken, the value dropped to 0.0027 waves and the value of the starting 10,000 tokens dropped to 173 dollars. But the important thing is that the students participated in every one of these happenings through the tokens stored in their wallets.
There have been other occasions when tokens were used for educational purposes. BitcoinHomeNetwork, an online entertainment platform dedicated to teaching about topics related to the blockchain technology, created a token called XTRA or ExtraCredit. Other educational tokens include Odem, which is part of an online educational platform gathering 200 teachers.
If the IEToken survives in the hands of students who decide to keep it or if its value drops to zero or raises, it all depends on the students, says professor Arranz. Thirty percent of the initial emission or 720,000 tokens will be assigned to a social project chosen by the students or managed by another section of the MBA programme, the Social impact lab.
