How We Got Ivy League Students to use Blockchain Tech

How could we get students that know nothing about crypto/blockchain/dapps/wallets to use Yup? We'll break down some of the most important decisions we made to grab the attention of 18-year-olds and build a product that was easy enough for them to use.

On Yup, we use colored underlines to reflect the agreed-upon social value of content in various categories: blue/green is highest, orange/red is lowest.

On Thursday Sept 5, the day of our official beta launch, we covered Columbia's campus in the same color-coding scheme as Yup's online overlays.

Yup is meant to be universal, functioning as a social layer for the whole web, but social networks like Twitter are so large that "Yupping" on them today is like a tree falling in a forest - no one hears it.

We knew that the only way to get college students excited about Yup was to build features that provide utility for them today and create school-wide consensus about something.

Yup is not trying to be a tool only for college students.

Because we wanted users who have never owned or interacted with crypto before to use Yup, we could not expect them to acquire cryptocurrencies in order to pay for transactions.

While most of us - myself included - working in the blockchain space prefer pure decentralization, we went with a semi-decentralized distributed ledger to help us reduce friction for new users.

Nir Kabessa is the co-founder of Yup.io and the President of Blockchain at Columbia.

Currently a senior undergraduate student at Columbia University, Nir spent his academic years deep in the distributed ledger space serving as a teacher's assistant for blockchain courses at Columbia and contributing to articles on Forbes, BigThink, Benzinga, Hackernoon, and more.