Read time: 7 mins
The Blockchain and the Future of Credentialing
By Martin Hall
A blockchain is a series of encrypted, peer-to-peer transactions that, together, constitutes a distributed ledger. Following the launch of the Ethereum platform in mid-2015, “smart contracts” that are secured in a set of blockchain transactions have been proposed for just about anything of value. This includes education qualifications and several universities are now offering digital certificates that are recorded in a blockchain.
In parallel with these digital innovations, the long-established ways of verifying university qualifications are becoming non-viable. Developed for a very different world, where few went into higher education and everyone could be expected to identify every university, the traditional systems of certification are non-scalable, increasingly unintelligible and inefficient.
In this White Paper, Martin evaluates the fit between the new and evolving opportunities of the blockchain, and the requirements for the radical reform of the ways in which higher education qualifications are certified, and can be verified.
Click on the image below to download this Smarter White Paper.
