Our simple, but revolutionary blockchain escrow system enables efficient, radically affordable peer-to-peer tutoring on a global scale. So get started and be a student, tutor, or both!
We are powered by the Cardano blockchain, whose extended UTxO model provides ideal security guarantees for small-transaction escrow. You'll interact using the Nami light wallet (other wallets coming soon).
If you're new to Cardano, welcome! Get some Ada from an exchange or a friend, and you're good to go. Or if you just want to tutor, just make a wallet and you can start accepting payments today.
We are proud to be fully community-funded via Cardano Project Catalyst. We are beholden to nobody else but you, the community! Sign up for our newsletter for updates.
Tutorchain does not vet, endorse or promote tutors. (That sounds like censorship to us, not the open market we crave.) However, you can browse listings created by registered tutors, or post an ad for tutors to see. Your email is never shared with tutors; you'll interact with them using an intermediate email (a la Craigslist).
You might also find a tutor on our discord server. But keep in mind that your dream tutor might be someone you already know, like a reddit poster or even a friend at school. Even if you trust the person, you may wish to consider using Tutorchain, which will help them build a verifiable reputation for a tiny fee.
Your email is used to communicate with Tutorchain and otherwise kept private. Your name is shown to your students and can also be listed publicly if you choose.
Traditional tutoring businesses take at least half of tutors' earnings, and online marketplaces typically take one third. By contrast, tutorchain takes no cut at all. (You heard that right.) We just charge a tiny (2 Ada) service fee to the student.
Tutoring marketplaces are reputation-based, and tutorchain is no exception. To get business here, you'll have to build up your reputation with successful lessons leading to good student reviews. However, the difference here is that your reputation is yours. Traditional services can alter or delete your reviews on a whim, if they think that you violated their terms of service (perhaps you took a student off-platform to avoid their large cut). By contrast, we have radically permissive terms of service (your students are yours!) and we couldn't delete or alter your reviews even if we wanted to, since they are stored immutably on chain (feature coming soon). As such, every review is verifiably associated with exchange of monetary value, so students know they are legit.
If the student reports that the lessson did not occur, Tutorchain will confirm with the tutor before sending the funds back. If there is disagreement, we use the zoom logs to decide the case.
*Students also pay a Cardano transaction fee (currently 0.17 Ada) and up to 4 Ada in dispute fees. The 4 Ada is deposited to Tutorchain at the time of escrow and serves as a good-behavior incentive. The deposit is normally returned in full; it is confiscated only if the student initiates and loses a dispute or violates our terms of service.
Our low-fee service is enabled by a simple, but revolutionary form of smart contract escrow. Rather than sending the lesson funds to Tutorchain, students deposit them into a smart contract that only gives us the authority to direct them appropriately—either to the specific tutor offering the lesson, or back to the student for a refund. Since payment passes directly from student to tutor, with Tutorchain only deciding whether it should take place, we have negligible compliance overhead and can offer radially affordable escrow services to users worldwide.
The smart contract also provides exceptional security guarantees. Funds escrowed for each lesson are stored separately, in a separate UTxO (script address). It is impossible for us to use the lesson cost funds for any purpose other than paying the specific tutor or refunding the specific student in that lesson. An attacker who compromises our signing keys would gain similarly limited access. There is no incentive to attack our system.