Ideaz

Start-up Name: SkillLink Bank

("Linking people through skills, banking knowledge as currency")

SkillLink Bank – Turning Knowledge into Currency

Today, learning is too frequently linked to money, and there are millions of people who cannot afford quality learning. Money is required by online courses, private tutors, and coaching centers, making it impossible for those with little money but great potential. Many others have useful skills—academic, creative, technical, or cultural—that lie dormant because there is no system to trade them sensibly.

SkillLink Bank addresses this by converting skills into a currency with a new value. Rather than paying with cash, users receive Skill Credits when they pass on skills to others. These credits are held in an electronic Skill Wallet and can be exchanged to acquire new skills. A math student can spend their credits learning to play the guitar from a musician, who can then spend their credits learning to code from a coder. It is a self-replenishing, cyclical knowledge economy.

Current edtech sites provide courses but are still based on cash, keeping things transactional in education. SkillLink Bank bridges the gap by making a genuine peer-to-peer exchange with every skill, no matter how large or small, being valuable. Through AI-aided verification, student-teacher matching, and quality rating, the system provides reliable, customized exchanges.

The reach is broad: students obtain access with no budget constraints, instructors receive recognition and meaning, and communities become stronger as a result of shared learning. With time, SkillLink Bank may become a worldwide "knowledge economy," with the skill credits themselves becoming valuable independent of the platform.

This concept is important to me because I think that education shouldn't be a luxury of wealth, but a human right. By making knowledge currency, we are able to discover untapped potential in each and every one of us and build a world in which learning has no bounds.