World's First School to Issue Academic Certificates via Bitcoin Blockchain

Holberton Software Engineering School announced it will become the first school to deliver academic certificates that are secured and accessible via Bitcoin’s blockchain. To this end, the school has collaborated with Bitcoin startup Bitproof that specializes in document certification on the blockchain.

The new blockchain-powered certificates should make it easier for employers to verify job candidates’ backgrounds and reduce the number of false resumes.

According to the information in Holberton school blog, each graduate will be given a paper certificate and a Digital Certificate Number (DCN). Graduates can include this number in their CV. Thus, the employer can easily verify this information just by checking this number in the blockchain explorer available online.

Sylvain Kalache, co-founder of Holberton School, stated:

"The blockchain is the future of certification, and we believe that in the following years, more schools will use the public blockchain to secure their certificates and diplomas."

Holberton School is a project-based alternative to college for the next generation of software engineers, which uses peer learning.

"It is much more efficient, secure, and simple than what you can find today in the industry,” Kalache continued. “We think first about our students – we want to make sure that our certificates will always remain valid and verifiable by employers. It will also keep them safe and impossible to copy or hack."

While this is the first school to implement the blockchain for academic certificates, the idea of using this public ledger to record and register various aspects of our lives is becoming increasingly common.

Today, everything from marriage, citizenship, artwork, and land registry, to even a World Passport can be transparently recorded on the blockchain as new uses are still being discovered. Moreover, the Refugee Emergency Response project from Bitnation is currently using the blockchain to help resolve the current refugee crisis in Europe by registering undocumented individuals on the blockchain.