BCDiploma, Blockchain the Degrees!

Meet Vincent Langard — CTO of BCDiploma

Published in

Rockside

5 min readJun 25, 2019

As part of of Community partnership, BCDiploma participates in the development of Rockside by testing the product and giving regular feedback. BCDiploma raises €1.2 million to become the global standard for certifying diplomas and certificates online. Meet with Vincent Langard, the CTO of BCDiploma.

Context

Misleading or embellishing your CV is not something new but the market has shifted during the digital rise. A lucrative business is booming with high-quality rendering (paper, stamps, ink). According to HireRight’s 2018 employment screening benchmark report, 84% of respondents have found a lie or misrepresentation on a resume and/or job application on educational credentials. In China, buying a fake diploma from the University of Hong Kong costs only US$250. In France, it costs roughly the same price for a degree from a reputable university. In the US, on top of a fake degree, a client can add a lawyer notarization at US$550 to attest the authenticity of the diploma. Huge!

The pain point

Beyond the unfair playing field that it creates for the real graduates from the Universities or Schools who have invested their time and money, sweat for their credentials and to deserve their diploma, the development of this business turns out to be very dangerous.

Many cases were presented where unscrupulous people did not have the hard skills to do their jobs. In some cases, the reputation of a company can be completely compromised and in the worst case, it can be the safety of people.

The current situation

Thankfully, some solutions already exist to verify the accuracy of the information. Dedicated firms benefit from a flourishing business to ensure a complete background check because the process of verification is costly and quite complex. The approximative cost for a background check is in between 50 to USD$100 per applicant. Now, think about the number of CVs that should be checked for one job offer and the growing level of sophistication on the fake side, the business could continue for a while.

That is where Blockchain technology can be a game changer. With its core characteristic: an immutable ledger, secure and distributed, the problem can be solved at the issuance point.

BCDiploma

BCDiploma is a French startup that simplifies drastically the educational background check of an Alumni by recording the diplomas on the Ethereum Blockchain. How does it work? When the diploma is issued by the university or school, a secured link is provided to the student that he or she can keep and use forever. Alumni can use their link on social media and/or provide it during an application process. The hiring company can easily check the authenticity of the diplomas directly through BCDiploma application. Consequently, the schools are less solicited by the recruitment firms to do the verification. All parties benefit from better productivity and avoid wasting their time with long calls and/or emails. Besides, the model could be replicated for other types of documents: online certificates, professional training, professional attendance to a corporate event, etc.

Today, an affordable solution with single pricing is applied for a long-term usage basis.

5 questions to Vincent Langard — CTO of BCDiploma

1. Could you pitch in one sentence what is BCDiploma?

BCDiploma is a sustainable, compliant and user-friendly solution that digitizes and secures any type of certificates on a blockchain.

2. Why did you choose to develop your application on Ethereum Blockchain?

We made this choice for multiple reasons. Ethereum benefits from a very active community with evolving tools. We are building a live product, not a proof-of-concept!

We need the transparency of a leading public blockchain to build trust in the entire ecosystem. Then, the usage of smart contract contributes also to increase this transparency: anyone can see the execution of the contract on top of the data. Besides, we have the feeling that the way Ethereum is going to progress, is the best match with our own roadmap.

In our business, reducing the issuance cost of a diploma is the real challenge. The proof of stake and/or the sharding implementation will enable us to face it.

3. Who are your clients?

Our first vertical is on Education and particularly post-graduate programs like Universities or Business schools. Today, we are already partnering with reputable players in France: Paris-Descartes University, ESCP Europe, EM Lyon, IAE Nantes and Financia Business School. We are also working to expand overseas because our solution is easily scalable, the University of Nuevo Leon in Mexico was our 1st foreign client and today we work with about thirty institutions from 4 continents and 9 different countries.

We are also thinking about other verticals. For example, we have been working for a few weeks on a pilot with Quai des Notaires (an online notary public services in France) on the authentication of the documents.

4. What are your key blockchain challenges as a CTO?

Bring the best user experience! The technology is still very complex, and the current tools are not simple to use. My job is to get rid of all this complexity for the end-user. Actually, they don’t even need to know that the underlying technology is based on Ethereum blockchain. The user journey has to be clear and mostly seamless.

5. How does Rockside bring you more value?

Generally speaking, to continue to expand, Blockchain needs more decentralized capacity (more nodes). So, we need tools to accelerate and simplify the deployment of this infrastructure. Rockside features allow us to easily do this job and smoothly monitor and maintain our application. With the on-premise version, we have also the feeling to be more independent compared to other Blockchain-as-a-service-solutions, we don’t need any third-party to manage our nodes. We also think that the multi-chain features which are planning soon would be helpful for us.

In a nutshell, Rockside enables us to focus on our main business and guarantee the sustainability of our solution.

Vincent, thank you for your feedback and congratulations on the Go-Live of BCDiploma!

Thx Claire DOUANGMALA for leading the interview.