As AI-Driven Crypto Scams Grow, Daria Bogun Addresses the Literacy Gap

An award-winning IT specialist who judges IT categories of international competitions, Daria Bogun built Crypto Compass, an adaptive educational platform for crypto and blockchain literacy, a model worth studying for anyone building education tools where one-size-fits-all instruction leaves learners behind.

Crypto fraud is increasingly an AI problem, and the losses are concentrated among the least prepared. Chainalysis's 2026 Crypto Crime Report found AI-enabled scams were 4.5 times more profitable than traditional ones in 2025, as deepfakes made impersonation schemes easier to scale. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded 181,565 crypto-related complaints, totaling $11.366 billion in losses, more than half of the $20.9 billion in total internet crime losses for the year, and Americans aged 60 and older, a demographic with comparatively low crypto and blockchain literacy, bore $4.4 billion of that total, the largest share of any age group.

To close that gap, Daria Bogun built Crypto Compass. She folded entry-level diagnostics, an adaptive learning path with sequential lesson unlocking, gamification, interactive quizzes, a glossary, and built-in market data into a single system. This consolidated approach replaces the scattered videos and exchange tutorials most beginners rely on to piece the subject together.  The platform has secured commercial agreements totaling over $150,000, along with interest from organizations including AWIC. We talked with Daria Bogun about the design decisions behind Crypto Compass, and why she thinks structure, not volume of content, is what determines whether crypto education works at all.

Daria, most crypto literacy content treats every learner the same, regardless of what they already know. What made you combine entry-level diagnostics, adaptive sequencing, gamification, a glossary, and live market data into one platform instead of leaving learners to assemble the subject from scattered tutorials?

A fixed course treats every learner as a blank slate, which wastes the time of anyone who already knows the basics and overwhelms anyone who doesn't. Someone who's already bought crypto before shouldn't sit through the same opening lesson as someone who's never touched a wallet. The diagnostic places a person on the path at the right point, and sequential unlocking keeps them moving through material at a pace that matches what they've retained, not just what week it is. Live market data keeps the material anchored to what's actually happening. The glossary solves a different problem: someone can look up an unfamiliar term mid-course instead of losing the thread entirely and giving up. Gamification is there for a different reason: it's what gets someone to open the app again tomorrow. 

Your background outside the platform itself is worth asking about too. You judge IT categories at international competitions; has that shaped how you approached building the platform?

It has, mainly in how skeptical it's made me of surface presentation over substance. Judging means looking past a polished pitch to ask whether something functions the way it claims to, whether the underlying logic holds up once you stop looking at the interface, and I held Crypto Compass to the same standard. In practice, that meant not letting one mechanism do two jobs: points, streaks, and milestones exist to build the habit of coming back, which is a motivation problem. Whether they understood the lesson is a different question, and it's answered somewhere else, by the comprehension checks built into the lessons.

Commercial traction is often the clearest signal of outside confidence in an early-stage product. Let's talk about numbers: Crypto Compass has been licensed under commercial agreements worth over $150,000 ahead of its public launch. What does that early traction tell you about the demand for this kind of literacy tool?

It tells me the demand isn't hypothetical. Partners are willing to commit to a structured, adaptive approach to crypto and blockchain literacy rather than assembling something in-house from generic financial-literacy content that isn't built specifically for this space. That suggests the gap I built Crypto Compass to close is one others recognize too, not just something I identified on my own; that level of commitment is evidence the problem is real and worth solving at scale, rather than a niche concern.

Beyond those agreements, industry interest is another marker worth exploring. AWIC has expressed interest in collaborating with Crypto Compass. What would that kind of relationship add to the platform?

Organizations like AWIC bring a wider vantage point on where literacy gaps are showing up across the industry, patterns that are harder to see from inside a single product, which is valuable input for deciding what the platform should cover next. The interest itself reflects the same pattern I keep seeing elsewhere: crypto and blockchain education is being recognized as infrastructure that needs building deliberately, not an afterthought bolted onto a product as a marketing feature.

In Crypto Compass, the comprehension check sits inside the lesson itself. Why keep the test that close to the material?

Crypto has a lot of concepts that only work if the one underneath them is solid. So where a lesson introduces something that has to hold before the next one makes sense, the check sits right there, while the material is the only thing in the learner's head. That's also the honest version of progress: a lesson counts as done because someone demonstrated they understood it, not because they swiped through it.

What do you think ultimately separates literacy platforms that change behavior from ones that just accumulate users?

It comes down to whether a platform treats literacy as something structured and measured, or as a pile of videos a user is left to sort through alone, with no clear order and no way to tell whether any of it landed. Crypto Compass was built around the first approach; the roadmap and the checks along it are the product, not the content library. That's what turns a new user into someone who recognizes a risky offer the next time they meet one, which is the difference between having watched something and having learned it.