Gaming is oh so hot right now.

Regardless of whether it's web2 or web3, the gaming industry is sizzling with big budgets and bigger revenues, and other sectors are taking notice of the lucrative reward-based gaming model.

One company positioning itself as a pioneer in the “Play to Earn” (P2E) education space is the Swiss-based Metable—the first ever metaverse focused on education that employs a “Learn to Earn” model that allows anyone to earn rewards for studying or teaching.

Metable started in 2021 with the idea of merging traditional education with blockchain. The company has already raised around $1 million and plans to go live in the coming weeks following its successful beta launch on the Polygon blockchai.

Users were able to explore the world, create their own avatars, and play quiz games. Ultimately, there will be five districts within the Metable metaverse, with the founding district hosting a maximum of 4,000 schools.

Schools are categorized by size—small, medium, large—and correspond to the size of the land you purchase. Small schools can host one course, medium schools up to four courses, and large schools up to 25 courses. When a district is full, the company will launch another district.

“In Metable, everyone from content creators to influencers to teachers can purchase land for a school and start to create courses and content in the form of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which can then be sold to the public,” Alessandro Moretti, co-founder of Metable said to me in a recent interview. “People can buy the course, study the course, and then resell it.”

Read more: Cronos Labs Believes Gaming Will Power The Next Wave of Web3 Adoption

Each time a student resells the course on-chain, the instructor earns royalties, something that would not be possible without blockchain. Just as students can create their own avatars, go inside the world and choose what they want to learn, so too can instructors come aboard the platform and “teach,” though the first wave of teachers is only open to influencers.

“We’ll have a review function that will help incentivize quality content creators,” Moretti said. “The better the teacher, the better the reviews, and we want to implement a leaderboard system that can reward the best content creators.”

Metable reviews all content before creators are allowed to create their own course within the world, and in the second version of the platform, the community will review and approve the content.

“We started as a centralized project because we were putting our own money and ideas at risk, but in the second version, we want to switch from a centralized metaverse to a decentralized metaverse,” Moretti said.

By becoming decentralized, Metable will introduce a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, so people who own the Metable token ($MTBL) can vote on new features within the metaverse. The company is working to convert their web2 points system to a decentralized tokenomic structure, with the $MTBL token currently undergoing a public presale.

“In the current version, you won’t earn tokens when you study, but that will be a feature we’ll be adding on,” Moretti said. “It’s been quite difficult converting the learning management system to blockchain, and we wanted to make sure the core functionality of the world worked well first before iterating on top of it.”

Moving the model on-chain has proven to be the most difficult task for Metable, which Moretti attributes to people simply being more comfortable with web2 and more unfamiliar with blockchain.

“People aren’t really understanding the possibility that exists to own the digital courses on the blockchain,” Moretti said. “People need to have more confidence in the technology.”

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To help build that confidence, Metable’s initial focus is on-boarding users to the web3 version of the platform, after which, it will focus on implementing its “Learn to Earn” model—the actual “learning” component being a digitized version of the real world learning experience.

“In the real world, you buy a book, you read it, you resell it,” Moretti said. “It’s the same thing, but with course access as an NFT.”

While course creators will be able to set the price and quantity of NFTs available, the goal is to eventually have the market help dictate the price of a particular course. If a course becomes extremely popular, the idea is the creator will be able to charge more for it.

For now, Metable is focused on developing its content creator relationships as it prepares for its official launch, though it remains to be seen if the “Learn to Earn” model has the legs to take off.

The company is confident it does, and points to its successful web2 rewards system, though the biggest issue seems to be web3 adoption amongst creators and teachers. To help ease the transition, Metable is targeting specific creators from its existing community and hopes their individual followings can usher in the first wave of students.

“While we’re based in Switzerland, we’re an Italian company,” Moretti said. “We speak Italian and have a large Italian community, so we’ve started to partner with a lot of Italian content creators. After that, we’ll start to bring Metable outside the Italian community.”