ODEM is a global education provider platform built on Ethereum’s digital ledger technology. The primary aim of the platform is to make education affordable, verifiable, accessible, and transferable through the use of blockchain and ODEM tokens (ODE), which is the native coin of the platform. ODEM aims to provide blended education (and, ultimately, live streamed and online classes) through a range of key services.

According to the whitepaper, the ODEM platform is connected to the Ethereum blockchain built on standard web and HTML technologies. The platform seeks to create a marketplace with an open-source on-chain Ethereum-based ERC-20 utility token. This token is utilized to transact ODEM digital assets and smart contracts to manage transactional data.

The ODEM platform aims to provide verification authority onto the blockchain, ensuring reliability. Moreover, the platform seeks to allow other decentralized educational providers to provide programs and get recognized as legitimate credentialing bodies. To achieve this, ODEM has developed a set of smart contracts and interfaces to seek to allow educational certificates to be signed, shared, secured, and verified entirely on blockchain.

ODEM aims to provide students with complete control over their educational records, but they can also allow employers to view their certificates through the Education Certification Viewing (ECV) contract. Such a feature seeks to enable third parties like employers to access the digital certificates of eligible candidates.

ODE is an ERC-20-based utility token that provides users with access to the ODEM platform through staking. A student stakes a preferred program by committing a small amount of ODE, whereas the educators stake courses they desire to teach. In this way, staking helps both educators and students to satisfy their interests.

The team behind the ODEM platform aims to create a set of smart contracts, standards, and protocols to incorporate terms and criteria like the program’s value in ODE, duration, and location. These smart contracts manage ODE transactions to educators and the issuance of student certificates.

The ODEM technical whitepaper was published in November 2018. ODEM was founded in 2017 by J.William Bayrd and Richard Maaghul. Maaghul is also the CEO of ODEM.