'Crypto College' Instructor Has Raked in More Than $388K for Week-Long NFT Class

Serial entrepreneur Greg Isenberg is offering a class on NFTs—and you have to buy an NFT to get in.

By Jason Nelson

In brief

• Greg Isenberg's week-long course will introduce students to non-fungible tokens, and decentralized communities.
• To access the course, students have to purchase an NFT.

So you want to get into NFTs, but don't know where to start? Greg Isenberg, a serial entrepreneur and crypto enthusiast, may have what you’re looking for—and he's not afraid to use a little FOMO to sell it.

Next week, Isenberg opens the virtual doors to Crypto College, an online course dedicated to teaching the ins and outs of NFTs, DAOs, and tokenized communities. You only get access to the course by buying a unique NFT from him, and the price of the NFT increases as more seats are sold, to cover the costs of minting. The first 29 enrollees paid 0.15 ETH; enrollees 30 to 50 paid 0.3 ETH, enrollees 51 to 100 paid 0.6 ETH, and so on. The final tier of enrollees will have to pay 1.5 ETH a seat, or roughly $7,099.08.

If you’re interested, you’d better hurry: So far, 153 of 288 seats have been snatched up, Isenberg says, generating 80 ETH ($388,000) so far. Isenberg says he capped it at 288 seats for class-size management.

If Crypto College sells out, at current ETH prices Isenberg stands to make well over $1.3 million.

Not a bad payday for a week-long streaming course. By comparison, four years of tuition at Harvard University costs around $200,000. The room and board are, of course, extra.

"The goal wasn't revenue, it was the community,” Isenberg tells Decrypt. “That's just always been my North Star."

FOMO is an effective sales tool

No stranger to new technology, Isenberg is a Web 3 community builder and CEO of Late Checkout, a design agency and fund for community-based products. (The 288 unique NFT class passes were individually hand-drawn by the Late Checkout team.) He also founded the messenger app Islands in 2016 and video app 5by in 2012, acquired by WeWork and StumbleUpon, respectively. Isenberg also was an advisor to Reddit and TikTok.

Crypto College gets underway on November 15 with the goal of teaching people how to mint NFTs, design and launch tokenized communities, and build DAOs. Isenberg is live-streaming the classes on Discord. (Your NFT ticket gets you access to the server.) He says he chose to live-stream the event to be more interactive, using breakout sessions so students can meet each other.

"You're gonna get hit by NFTs from all sides," Isenberg says. "It's going to be gaming, it's going to be communities, it's going to be creators creating their own NFT projects and it's going to be artists, it'd be from everywhere."

Isenberg says he created Crypto College because he felt there wasn't enough information to help guide people through the process of creating these tokenized community projects.

"When I first got into NFTs, I thought it was a game-changer and the future," he says. "It's going to supercharge digital communities. It's a challenge to easily explain these concepts, but my hope is that this crawl-walk-run structure will be helpful." Regardless, it will certainly be lucrative.