Sapiens Platform: Blockchain for Academic Certification Transformation

Academia is an industry ripe for the picking as far as blockchain technology goes. There is much criticism over laborious certification verification processes that are both drawn-out and archaic.

Sapiens Platform aims to address precisely that. Invest in Blockchain explores the thinking behind this proposed blockchain application.



The Importance of Decentralizing the Academic Certification System

Acquiring a qualification is costly, and requires hard work and many sacrifices along the way. But even once the final grade has been passed and your name’s on the much-deserved paper, it’s still not quite … yours. Instead, the standard academic model grants you a copy that, should you lose it or require additional verification, is a pain to replace or verify.

The current process to verify the authenticity of a certificate is generally slow and analog, and often includes phone calls to the issuer. Not only is this time-consuming, costly, complicated, and unreliable, but if those organizations cease to exist, records can no longer be verified.

Students deserve to own their certificates and records in an accessible, shareable format.

Blockchain as A Game Changer

Blockchain can act as a notary. The blockchain, in essence, is a distributed ledger to record transactions. What makes it special is that it is durable, time-stamped, transparent, and decentralized. Decentralization is the solution that puts people in control of their own records.

Ownership empowers people to self-disclose, and blockchain technology makes it easy for third parties to issue or verify cryptographically-sealed certificates without relying on centralized and human-driven authorities, which are not immune to fraud or fake data manipulation.

Digital Academic Credentials: A Logical Next Step

Digital academic credentials enable accessibility, shareability, verifiability and traceability of achievements and professional certifications. Anyone with access to the internet can build a verifiable portfolio of their own academic credentials. By using blockchain and strong cryptography, it is now possible to create a certification infrastructure that puts users in control of the full record of their achievements and accomplishments.

The Sapiens Platform provides an easy way to create digital badges and to issue verifiable certifications. All these aspects are embedded in a secure shell provided by blockchain technology.

Sapiens Project: The Basics

Sapiens Project is an ambitious project capable of revolutionizing academic, certification and reputation systems.

It is a platform where schools, universities, companies and private institutions can share their resources and services through a decentralized, cost-effective and secure blockchain solution. The Sapiens Platform provides tools to issue and verify academic records, professional certification, achievements, licenses, and more.

Users are able to build their career by collecting badges and certificates in a shareable form. They have the ability to deploy proof of ownership and, consequently, create a reputation report for verifiable career tracking.

In addition, at a later stage, the platform will also allow for an online courses marketplace.

The Technology Behind Sapiens

Sapiens Platform is being built as a Lisk sidechain. Before taking Lisk technology into consideration, Matteo Ferrari, Sapiens founder and a software engineer by trade, was playing around with Ethereum and its smart contract technology. However, Ethereum couldn’t satisfy the project requirements due to its scaling issues. This was overcome by employing Lisk instead.

He explains:

“We can look at the Ethereum platform as a single giant and slow computer where every project is running at the same time. Ethereum provides the security layer, but it has huge scaling issues. Lisk’s approach is different: it relies on sidechain technology. This means that a single project is going to have a specific blockchain and network to operate with. This is the perfect solution for a project like Sapiens and it will reduce the risks of processing bottleneck.”

Sapien Platform’s Developmental Road Map

Sapiens is a project that will be strictly bound to Lisk SDK capabilities. Accordingly, Sapiens’ road map will follow the Lisk SDK road map. It will start with the creation of the sidechain and Sapiens Tokens. This is because the first version of SDK will provide these functionalities only. Sapiens Platform will be built iteratively after every release of Lisk SDK.

Sapiens is built on the idea that of an infallible, unstoppable, secure and reliable platform that anyone can use and trust because it doesn’t rely on third parties or central authorities. This is possible only thanks to the core innovation that blockchain is delivering to humanity. Academia is about to get interesting again.