Hello @lavande & Optimism community 
Here is a progress update and release timeline for the Layer 2 Blockchains lesson @ Bankless Academy:
We launched the precursor lesson, Layer 1 Blockchains, in early December.
We completed the User Research component of the build the week before Christmas, where we partnered with Layer 2 educator Patrick McCorry to run our small-class learning sessions. These sessions hosted 17 frequent Academy users, and allowed our content team to understand how our users handle the learning of Layer 2 concepts.
These sessions showed us that we were missing content in the Academy user journey around funding Layer 2 wallets for users who aren’t established on Centralised Exchanges. We’ve launched a new micro-lesson format (Mirror articles embedded in the Academy app) to allow us to swiftly plug user journey gaps like this one. In this case, the first article focuses on three ways to fund a wallet on Layer 2 (using Optimism as the example).
By including this in the user journey as prerequisite content (rather than inside the L2 lesson), we can maintain the L2 lesson focus on tech, benefits, and the Optimism ecosystem without having to dilute with explanations of wallet/funding UX.
The Layer 2 lesson is now in the first pass of writing review, where our team is ensuring that the topics, sub-topics, examples and order of presentation our writers have delivered match up with constructive illustration progression, the quest planned by our dev, and the overall Academy user journey.
After this review is complete, the writers will perform edits, and the content will be passed to the illustrators. Quest development and marketing preparations begin next week - @lavande I’m interested to know if there is availability for social media support by the Optimism Collective to boost engagement on launch? This will result in more people completing the Optimism onboarding quest and collecting their Academy soulbound badge.
Speaking of, we just passed 2100 badges minted since our badge launch in October (reminder: these badges are protected by Gitcoin Passport, meaning they’re highly sybil resistant). We’re very happy to be receiving so much app activity during a bear market - it will be interesting to monitor these figures as we release more content and hit the next bull market and as various ecosystems build out utility for these badges 
We’re currently projecting the lesson release and launch campaign for the first week of February. Thank you for your patience with the build process. We’re excited to release this lesson - the last entry to our essentials curriculum - and get Academy user exploring the Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem early next month!
PS: We’re also looking for a tech/culture expert @ Optimism to review the lesson content in the coming weeks. Does anyone have a recommendation/interest themselves?
@katie @mastermojo @polynya