MIT Media Lab announced the launch of blockchain certificates ‘Blockcerts’, which is an open standard for digital academic certificates on the blockchain platform.
The blockchain certificates offer a decentralized credentialing system. The blockchain provides trust and the credentials are tamper-resistant and verifiable. The potential uses of Blockcerts lie in the context of academic, professional and workforce credentialing, the release stated.
“All of our code is released under the MIT open source license, which means anyone can use it, share it, and develop applications on top of it,” the blog post stated.
Blockcerts has four components, where first is the 'Issuer', in which universities can create digital academic certificates, containing a wide range of assertions about an individual’s skills, achievements, and register it on bitcoin blockchain. The second component is 'Certificates' that are open badges compliant and third being 'Verifier' that allows anyone to verify a certificate to ensure that it is non-tampered and issued by a particular institution. The fourth component is 'Wallet', in which individuals can safely store their certificates and share them with others. The iOS wallet is available to download with Android version soon to be launched.
The project is open and enables MIT Media Lab to bootstrap a new ecosystem for digital academic credentials, by allowing other collaborators to take co-ownership. Blockcerts invites developers, universities, colleges and workforce training providers, employers, and education technology companies, universities interested in blockchain research, among others to be a part of it.
“We are hoping to establish Blockcerts as the open standard for issuing, sharing, and verifying digital academic credentials. To this end, we are looking for organizations to deploy the code, to build applications on top of it, and to join our developer community,” it added.
