Blockcerts: An open standard for blockchain academic certificates created by MIT

If you were asked to design a degree certificate or professional certificate, how would you design it? This is exactly the problem that MIT Media Lab has been working on for the past year. Recently, the institution launched a blockchain certificate project Blockcerts, an open standard for digital academic certificates based on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Blockcerts provides a decentralized certification system. Because it relies on the most secure Bitcoin blockchain, its credentials are tamper-proof and verifiable. In addition, Blockcerts can be used to issue any type of certificate, including professional certificates, transcripts, credits or degrees.

Four components:

Issuer : Colleges and universities create digital academic certificates that can include an individual’s skills, achievements, or characteristics and register this information on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Certificates : Certificates are open and compatible, which is important because openness is becoming an IMS standard.

Verifier : Anyone can become a verifier without the issuer’s permission. Verifiers can verify that (1) the certificate has not been tampered with, (2) it was issued by a specific authority, and (3) it was issued to a specific user.

Wallet : Individuals can securely store their credentials in the wallet and share them with others, such as your employer. The iOS wallet is already online, and MIT Media Lab is looking for partners to develop an Android version of the wallet.

On the project homepage ( http://blockcerts.org ), you can find reference implementations of software components, extensive documentation, and information about how to join the development community. All of Blockcerts' code is released under the MIT open source license, which means anyone can use it, share it, and develop applications on it.

If you’re interested in the Blockcerts project, you can read these long articles (here, and here).

The importance of open standards

The Blockcerts software is open source and anyone is welcome to join the project's developer community.

Only open standards allow individuals to have full control over their own academic history. This is important because student credentials are important credentials for individuals. They can be a ticket to a good job or a good education, and we can use them to tell stories about who we are and how we became that person.

Openness enables us to share ownership with other collaborators and lead a new ecosystem for digital academic credentials. By collaborating around open standards, we can help ensure an interoperable credential ecosystem.

Next steps

MIT Media Lab hopes that Blockcerts will serve as an open standard for issuing, sharing, and verifying digital academic certificates. To this end, the institution is looking for organizations to deploy the code, build applications on it, and join the Blockcerts developer community.

Developers can join the github repository or join the slack community to ask (or answer) questions on their own and share best practices.

Universities and staff training providers can start issuing digitally verifiable certificates to trainees. Employers can start validating the certificates they receive. They can use the reference implementation to create their own validation service in-house (or wait for a trusted third-party validator to emerge). They can also apply to have Blockcerts simplify their certificates to streamline the hiring process.

Education technology companies can begin developing applications based on the Blockcerts standard.

About Blockcerts

Blockcerts started as a research project at the MIT Media Lab, led by Philipp Schmidt (Director of Innovation at the MIT Media Lab) and Juliana Nazare (with help from many people including Guy Zyskind and Jeremy Rubin), and the project has been fortunate to find a great group of collaborators. Kim Hamilton has been the technical lead and release manager for the core software and standards, while Chris Downie has been working on the iOS wallet. Chris Jagers and Dan Hughes have been thinking about the broader implications of open standards for academic certification.