NFTs as verifiable course certificates, degrees and transcripts

The authenticity problem in education refers to the issue of individuals falsifying their academic records, such as grades or degrees, to gain undue advantages. Faking academic credentials undermines the integrity of the education system. It devalues the hard work and achievements of genuine students and graduates. Employers who hire based on these fraudulent credentials may suffer from decreased productivity, reputation damage, and potential legal issues. Unqualified individuals occupying positions of power with fake degrees pose potential risks to society.

In this post, we explore the use of NFTs for course certificates, degrees and transcripts

Solving the Authenticity Problem

Blockchain technology can be used to issue and verify academic credentials. The idea is to use a decentralized and immutable ledger of records that cannot be altered or tampered with. This makes it easier for employers and institutions to verify the authenticity of academic documents.

Issuance of Digital Certificates: Educational institutions can issue digital diplomas or certificates that are recorded on the blockchain. Each digital certificate is given a unique identifier or hash, which is then added to the blockchain. This hash is a digital fingerprint of the ctual certificate, and it can’t be changed once it’s added to the blockchain.
Verification of Academic Credentials: Employers or other educational institutions can verify the academic credentials of an individual by checking the owner of the identifier or hash on the blockchain. If creator of the the digital certificate provided by an individual matches a known institution, the credential is authentic.
Prevention of Fraud: Since the blockchain is tamper-proof and decentralized, it is impossible to forge or alter academic credentials.
Lifelong Learning Portfolio: Blockchain can also be used to create a lifelong learning portfolio, where all of an individual’s academic and professional learning achievements are recorded and easily accessible.
Durability. Even if the awarding institution ceases to exist or is unable to provide verification for some reason, the credential remains verifiable on the blockchain. This offers a significant advantage over traditional methods of verification, which rely on the institution’s ability to confirm the credentials (or on the existence of the company providing them with technical support).

NFTs for academic credentials

NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are a type of digital assets created using blockchain technology. Each NFT has a digital signature that proves both its authenticity (who issued it?) and ownership (who owns it?). NFTs are appropriate for the use case of issuing and verifying academic credentials for several reasons:

Uniqueness: Just like academic credentials, each NFT is unique with its own metadata and cannot be replaced with something else. This makes NFTs ideal for representing unique academic credentials of an individual.
Ownership: NFTs can clearly define and prove ownership, which in the case of academic credentials, would be the individual who earned the degree or certificate.
Indestructibility: As NFTs are stored on the blockchain, they cannot be destroyed, removed, or replicated, ensuring that academic credentials remain safe and secure.
Verifiability: The authenticity of an NFT can be verified by anyone as it contains detailed information about when and where it was minted and who owns it. Academic credentials as NFTs can be easily verified by employers or other institutions.

By representing academic credentials as NFTs, educational institutions can leverage the benefits of blockchain technology to issue secure, verifiable, and permanent records of academic achievement.

Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain wich is stronideal platform for creating and managing NFTs, including those representing academic credentials. The idea is that educational institution create a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain to create NFTs. This contract would include the rules for the creation of the NFTs, such as the metadata to be included (like the degree earned, date, etc.), and the ownership details. Once the smart contract is in place, the institution mints the NFT representing the academic credential. The NFT is linked to the unique information about the academic credential. The minted NFT is then assigned to the student who has earned the academic credential. This is done in Ethereaum by sending the NFT to the student’s Ethereum wallet address. The authenticity and ownership of the NFT can be verified by anyone on the Ethereum blockchain using a blockchain explorer such as Etherscan. This means that potential employers or other educational institutions can verify the academic credential by checking the NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

Course “Programmable Society” at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

“Programmable Society” is a course given at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It teaches blockchain technology with an emphasis on programming with smart contracts. As a natural follow-up of the course the students who passed the course were awarded a course certificate NFT. The NFT was issued on Ethereum mainnet. See https://github.com/KTH/programmable-society/tree/2023/nft-certificate.

Challenges and Future work

Not all educational institutions may have the necessary technological infrastructure to implement this system. It requires resources software, and technical expertise. However, the biggest challenge related to NFTs for academic credentials relates to managing digital identities.

Blockchain transactions are secured through cryptographic keys. Each user has a pair of keys - a private key, which is kept secret, and a public key, which is shared with others. The private key is used to issue course certificate NFTs, and to prove the ownership of the NFT. If a private key of an academic institution is stolen, academic can effectively be countereited. If a private key of an indiviudal is stolen, the thief may actually fake being the true owner of an academic degree. To prevent this, robust digital identity management systems must be implemented. These systems should ensure the secure creation, storage, and management of blockchain secrete keys.

Secure Storage: Private keys should be stored securely to prevent loss. This could involve using hardware wallets, which store keys offline, or multi-signature wallets, which require multiple keys to authorize a transaction.

Recovery Mechanisms: In case a private key is lost, there should be mechanisms to recover the associated NFTs. This could involve using backup keys or implementing multi-factor authentication.

Identity Verification: To prevent impersonation, robust identity verification processes should be implemented. This could involve using biometric data or existing identity verification infrastructure such as BankId in Sweden. It’s also important to verify the identities of the institutions issuing the NFTs. This could involve using a decentralized identity verification system, where the identities of institutions are verified by multiple parties on the blockchain. This would prevent unaccredited institutions from issuing NFTs.

Conclusion

The authenticity problem in education, where individuals falsify their academic records, is a significant concern. A potential solution to this problem could be the use of blockchain technology and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). By using a decentralized and immutable ledger for academic credentials, one obtains a secure and verifiable system for issuing and verifying these credentials. A crucial challenge is the secure management of digital identities on the blockchain for both institutions and individuals. using blockchain technology and NFTs for academic credentials could revolutionize the education sector by providing a secure, transparent, and efficient system for issuing and verifying academic achievements.