Blockchain solution to digital credential issuance and verification

A badge can represent a broad range of things, such as a nursing certification, identification card, degree, license or technical certification. All of these things have one thing in common, they are used to prove something about something or someone else. They also all must be at some point be issued to a recipient, held by that recipient, and verified by some third party consumer. Lets take a look at one of the simplest examples, taking a test and earning a certification, how does BadgeForce use blockchain technology to improve this process?

The parties involved

BadgeForce uses Ethereum smart contracts to represent issuer’s and holders’ Issuer’s can be an organization, corporation, individual or anyone else that issues certificates or badges. Holder’s are the recipients of these certificates and badges. In this example our issuer will be a fictitious company that proctors certified nursing assistant exams, lets call it “Nursing Exam Inc”. Our holder will be “Jason”, who took this CNA exam and passed. Finally our consumer will be the local nursing home “Happy Living Nursing Home” that requires a CNA certificate to qualify for it’s “Care Giver” position opening.

Using smart contracts to form an ecosystem

In order for our company Nursing Exam Inc to join the BadgeForce ecosystem they must purchase some BadgeForceTokens for use and get a new Issuer smart contract. This Issuer contract is tied to the Ethereum address that Nursing Exam Inc owns. They are now able to create different badges and issue them to recipients. Jason also joins the BadgeForce ecosystem but instead gets a new Holder smart contract that is tied to the Ethereum address he owns. Now he can hold credentials on this contract, have them verified and whitelist the issuers that he trusts.

Create, Issue, Verify

Lets assume Nursing Exam Inc creates a CNA badge on their Issuer contract and issues it to Jason’s holder contract after he whitelists them. At this point metadata about this badge has been generated and saved for future verification and Jason now has his CNA badge on his Holder contract. The metadata prevents Jason from tampering with his badge and forging data for example changing it to say that he is a licensed pediatrician rather than a certified nursing assistant. Finally, Jason can apply for the Care Giver position open at Happy Living Nursing Home and submit his CNA badge to them by giving them his Holder contract address. Using a BadgeForce verifier tool the nursing home can verify that Jason indeed does have the qualifications to become a Care Giver.

What are the benefits ?

All of the parties involved benefit by replacing their old methods with the BadgeForce process. Our issuer no longer needs to rely on printing, and snail mail to facilitate getting their badges to their recipients, and can be sure that these issued badges can’t be forged with photoshop, hacking, etc. Jason now has access to his earned badges, certificates and credentials at all times, they won’t get lost in the file cabinet or thrown away by the cleaning service on accident. Due to the decentralized nature of the blockchain everyone involved owns their data, this means you do not have to rely on the health and status of some centralized service in control of your data, you are the boss. Our nursing home can now verify these CNA badges instantly there is no need to rely on third party services, background checks or contacting issuer’s. Everyone saves time and saving time saves money.

In our next post we will dive into the technical aspects of verifying a BadgeForce credential, in the mean time checkout our ICO page, Github and talk to us on Telegram. Thanks for reading we look forward to your feedback.