First-of-its-kind Privacy-Preserving NFTs Used as Certificate for Massive Open Online Course

In a first-of-its-kind initiative, NFTs and badges will be awarded as a course credential from DeFi MOOC. However, these NFTs go beyond the usual functionalities seen today, as these will offer privacy-protecting functionality. By utilizing Oasis Platform’s secure data governance API, called Parcel, course credentials can be verified while user information is kept private.

The first DeFi MOOC — a Massive Open Online Course all about DeFi — was held in Fall 2021 by Professor Dawn Song, Christine Parlour (University of California, Berkeley), Dan Boneh (Stanford), Andrew Miller (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Arthur Gervais (Imperial College London).

Since then, the course has attracted many thousands of students participating from over 30 countries all over the world and currently boasts more than 180K lecture views. As a way to commemorate the completion of this course, each qualified student will now be awarded a DeFi MOOC 2021 NFT.

Given the desire to have both a tradable NFT and a non-tradable certificate, the DeFi MOOC team has issued a DeFi MOOC NFT and a Soulbound MBuddy Identity badge that certifies students’ course achievement. Soulbound tokens are another type of NFT that are permanent, and non-transferable.

DeFi MOOC will be using a privacy-enhancing solution supported by MetaMirror on the Oasis Network — the leading scalable and privacy-enabled layer-1 blockchain network — to provide verifiable certification while protecting user data and privacy.

In this post, we’ll cover the motivations and future of this exciting technology.

NFT Authentication with Real-World Privacy Protection

In essence, DeFi MOOC will be using students’ MBuddy Identity to distribute class NFTs. This will:

• Offer a non-transferable identity badge that serves as the course completion certificate, that can be reused on other occasions.
• Preserve the privacy of the NFT receiver as students will not need to expose their wallet addresses to the course staff, or any other unnecessary parties
• Be usable in the MBuddy platform as an input for user-defined identity generation to create more comprehensive identities.

Each qualified student will be given both a tradable NFT and a non-tradable badge. There will be four tiers of NFTs and the NFTs will be distributed in accordance with the rules on the MOOC’s website (https://defi-learning.org/f21).

Most people understand blockchain to have basic computation functionality, often with a sacrifice on user’s data privacy. However, by using Oasis’ Parcel — a privacy-first data governance SDK designed to put sensitive data to use while keeping it secure and private — the DeFi MOOC is able to implement a non-transferable certificate while protecting the identity of the NFT holder. This certificate proves that the course has been accomplished, while keeping secret real-world identity from the associated wallet address.

Parcel has been utilized in NFT technology on Oasis in the form of Confidential NFTs which again represent additional functionality for these blockchain assets. Confidential NFTs operate just like regular NFTs but also confer access to entirely private data that, on Parcel’s full permission and compute layer, can be put to work in a number of different ways.

The resulting non-tradable badge becomes a verifiable credential that can then be shared with others by incorporating it into their MBuddy Web3 identity, a Web 3.0+ identity infrastructure that bridges immense Web 2.0 data value onto blockchains.

How it works

As a Web 3.0 identity infrastructure, MBuddy gives data control and data rights back to individual owners. Users initiate data sharing under full-stack privacy preservation for personal good. The use of NFTs in Web3 identity is a perfect fit, and there is alignment between Oasis and its focus on data privacy, and what MBuddy is looking to achieve.

1) Defining the identity badge

Since MBuddy Identity generation is conducted with full privacy preservation, it is capable of taking data input from all sources and safeguarding private information.

This allows the badge definer to distribute the identity badge without accessing the receivers’ wallet addresses. In particular, the badge can be distributed based on, but not limited to, email addresses, Web 2.0 service accounts, and KYC identification data.

In the DeFi MOOC, this badge is distributed based on the student’s UUID — a one-time random number..

1. The course staff first defines an identity badge called Fall 2021 Class Certificate.
2. The algorithm determines the class tier of a user based on a unique credential UUID that is submitted by the student.
3. The algorithm is then stored and computed within a privacy-preserving storage and computation environment of Oasis Platform’s Parcel.

2) Distributing the identity badge

Students claim their Fall 2021 Class Certificate by generating their MBuddy Identity. This is a user-controlled Web3.0 identity where data is stored in the user’s own Parcel account as personal data assets to serve as input for identity generation.

The Fall 2021 Class Certificate identity badge requires two verifiable data inputs: wallet address and a credential ID. The user’s credential ID is fed into the algorithm defined in the last section to determine which of the four class tiers the student will receive.

3) Applying identity badge in NFT allocation

The course staff and the student then have access to the data of the Fall 2021 Class Certificate identity badge and can utilize it. That is, the course staff have access to precisely the required information to perform an NFT airdrop: the wallet address and the class tier. After generating the identity badge, MOOC class NFT will be airdropped within 5 days.

4) Applying certificate in extended use cases

The Fall 2021 Class Certificate is a user-autonomous MBuddy Identity attribute that’s generally not accessible to the general public. Only the badge owner — the student themselves — and the Space owner have access to read the value of this attribute.

Since the MBuddy owner is in control of the usage of their identity, so under extended use cases, the badge holder may grant access to a third party based on the badge holder’s need.

Looking Forward

DeFi MOOC NFT presents a solution for awarding on-chain assets and credentials to designated audiences without exposing additional identification information. This solution mitigates the challenge of traditional certification services to onboard decentralized networks.

In addition, since MBuddy is a modular identity infrastructure that modularly adopts different data sources, including Web 2.0 data, on-chain data as well as KYC data. We see that the class certificate is not simply attached to a wallet address; but instead, to a comprehensive identity that students can leverage in the future for personal goods.

For more information about the technology empowering this unique decentralized identity solution, please read our blog. Additionally, you can follow our social channels.

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