The world needs a new system to record, house, curate, secure, and distribute evidence of learning. That new system is the global blockchain and every individual is a lifelong registrar.

The MIT Media Lab and Learning Machine have been working on a collaborative project for issuing official records to recipients, and anchoring them onto the Bitcoin blockchain. We’ve just open-sourced the first version of that project and named it Blockcerts. It allows education providers, employers, and others to issue official certificates that supply proof of membership, completion, or achievement. These certificates can be collected by individuals and shared directly with anyone who requires official documents. The Bitcoin blockchain is currently being used as the secure anchor of trust to ensure that each certificate is authentic, unchanged, and still valid. If another open, immutable data store is proven reliable — for example, Ethereum’s public blockchain — issuing to those resources can easily be included.

Our goal is to help create an entirely new environment where individuals are the custodians of their official records and can easily share those records with others.

The example below was created to illustrate how the verification process works. Ultimately this verification process wouldn’t only be a button on the certificate display, but also verifiable through independent service providers.