Open Academy — Telegram Channel

Open Academy runs as a Telegram Mini App built around short, free courses with certificates, layered with a points-and-token reward system and a separate NFT collectible side-project. The educational content covers a mix of topics: a beginner course called "Open Claw 101" that over 9,600 users have completed, a partnership course with the EMCD platform on cryptocurrency payment cards (five lessons on how crypto-to-fiat payments work), and a course on using AI tools for illustration work, taught by a designer with a background at Yandex Practicum. Courses are described as short — around five lessons each — and the channel is upfront that the library is still thin because the team is prioritizing the app and studio before adding volume.

The reward side is more complicated and has changed more than once. Users earned "SC" points from completing courses, tasks, and referrals across two seasons; both seasons have now ended, with SC converting into an "OA" token. Posts announce that ongoing rewards for general app activity are being phased out, with future OA rewards limited to members of something called "The Squirrel Club" and tied to specific actions rather than everyday use. That Squirrel Club connects to a separate NFT mint — "The Early Squirrels" — where users collect in-app "acorns," craft them into squirrel NFTs of varying rarity on TON via GetGems, and can buy or sell acorns on a secondary market. Multiple mint batches have sold out quickly, and the channel frames the acorn supply as deliberately limited.

Taken as a whole, this is less a pure education channel than a gamified crypto product: free courses and certificates sit alongside a shifting points economy and an NFT collectible layer, and the rules for earning rewards have already been rewritten twice in the visible history. Readers who want structured, free lessons on crypto-adjacent topics (payment cards, AI tools) will find genuine content here. Readers drawn in by the token or NFT mechanics should go in aware that both the reward terms and the "Club" gating have already shifted once and could shift again, and that acorn/squirrel trading is a speculative collectible market layered on top of the courses, not part of them.