Blockchain and Digital Certificates
This article talks about How, Why and What goes into getting digital certificates on the blockchain.
What:
Issuing digital certificates on Blockchain to leverage immutability, public record to provide endorsement and validate it accordingly to prevent fraud and mutilation of records by involved entities.
Do you even need a blockchain ?
Is it necessary ?
Need:
Within the market, exists a need to mitigate fraudulent certificates and manipulation of records to ensure honest and seamless trade.
Modifying certificates and contracts for deceiving, misconstruing or fake anything are a breach of ethics.
Target Market / Use Cases:
- Real Estate
- Employment records
- University Certificates
- Contracts between Small and Medium sized businesses
- Digital rights / Copyrights
Implications:
Each situation is unique in its own respect.
Each use case requires customization to ensure the following:
- Auditability
- No centralization of resources
- Authentication of source
- Verification of receiver
- Ensuring validity of issued certificates
- Must be reliable and trustworthy
- Tools and Software to enforce easy adoption
Ideal Outcome:
- Transparent issual of ownership certificate
- Translation and appropriate depiction of Proof of work
- Auditable network
- Rating and review system
How:
- Tokens vs No tokens
With the given trend in raising initial coin offerings and this being a blockchain project, it’d be eventful to raise funding from the public and a VC, to keep them involved and guide as the market adoption ensues.
Are you making a currency or raising funds with no return for development ?
There ought to be a clear cut reason for issuing tokens and its use case.
- Incentivization methodologies
Are you going to incentivize the auditor ?
Are you going to incentivize the Issuer ?
Are you going to incentivize the endorsee ?
Regardless, incentivisation must be automatic and not under specific control with the highest priority being allocated to how it might turn out 10 years later. In short, incentivisation must be scalable in the long term.
- Authentication of issuer and source
Banks, Universities and majority of institutions exist as a medium of trust.
Law inhibits behavior to promote investments in goodwill to reduce chaos and promote higher quality trade.
Introducing a system that completely changes the existing record system is pure suicide for no one will change right away. Organisational change is a slow and induced process.
For the both the issuer and the receiver to trust the system, there must be an accepted standard. This standard is implemented into the ease of adoption.
Both need to have vested interests if not genuine interests to change from a previous system to a new blockchain backed one;
Again, where, whom and how are you incentivising ?
Implementation:
This implementation shall solely the architecture of what could be an efficient system.
Case Study:
This is purely for demonstration purposes. Do not raise an ICO on this model.
I shall enumerate a hybrid blockchain. This hybrid blockchain will have specific write access permissions but publicly auditable. A record can always be obtained from a centralized authority, but you’re given the liberty to host your own node for incentives.
A university to issue certificates on the blockchain and the corporate entities can cut down significantly on the number of background checks done.
A three way Modular architecture composing of:
- A person’s portfolio, say Steve’s portfolio.
- The university Steve attended and his mentors.
- The company that Steve has applied to.
Steve upon finishing each class gets his record signed in order of the classes he’s taken by his professors.
This forms a directed acyclic graph similar to vet for the order of classes in which they were taken. This prevents double spending.
Upon completion of the term/semester, Steve gets his transcript(essentially a chain of signatures for the classes taken.
Professors sign his cumulative list of classes in ordinance with a ring architecture and the obtained hash( of all of Steve’s classes and his professor’s signatures) is passed as meta-data of the transaction sent from the university’s address to an address generated from Steve’s Public key.
The university then publishes or lets Steve publish his classes and coursework which can be verified easily.
The employer publishes his address in the public domain.
Steve generates a signed session key (using the employer’s address) that lets the employer access steve’s record from his college for a brief period of time.
Upon hearing the employer’s decision, Steve can decide to revoke the previous signed session key that he generated.
Non signed session keys will not let anyone access Steve’s records.
There are numerous ways this model can be improved but this would be the core crux of delivering people their freedom of their information, credentials, university to maintain records and the employer to verify coursework, projects alike.
References:
- IOTA
- MIT Digital Cert.
- VSK chain by Prof Veni Madhavan, IISc
I hope this was helpful,
Thank you
