The team at Certify.pk is onto something big. They aim to change how educational degrees are verified in Pakistan for good. No more lining up in queues. No more delays.
If you are from HR department of a company and want to hire a candidate you have now a solution to verify their degrees. And, if you are from an education institute, you have a solution to validate degrees of only eligible students.
Let’s get into details, how this works.
How the whole thing works
The process of degree verification runs on blockchain technology. A degree is a digital document that has its own digital identification like a QR code that a degree holder can share with anyone who wants to verify the degree. Once a graduate awards a degree, the university can create a digital document of that degree and push it on blockchain. Once the degree is pushed on blockchain, the university will share with student the unique identification that he or she can share with anyone who is interested to verify the degree.
It’s like university saying “Hey, here is the acknowledgment that this particular student’s degree is genuine. I have put that on blockchain and you can see that through the QR code”
The HR or anyone who wants to verify the degree will access the blockchain and check if the degree is genuine by providing the QR code. The blockchain will confirm that “Yes, the university that awarded this degree has confirmed itself that it’s genuine. Go ahead”.
Why blockchain?
One can think why not develop a software with server-client model and give access to universities. Why get into complexity of blockchain? The whole purpose of utilizing blockchain technology is to capitalize the core of it i.e. trust, security and real time update. Having this solution developed on blockchain will ensure that no one can edit the digital document (degree) once it has been shared by the institute. It’s like a stamp from the university.
Everyone can see that the degree was shared by the university itself and since it’s not editable by anyone, it gives credibility to the verification process.
How can universities benefit from it?
Universities interested to make use of this technology can get themselves registered with Certify.pk by sending an email to info@blockchaintech.com.pk. It takes couple of days to setup the software and train the staff about how to create and push the degree as a digital document on blockchain.
Similarly, organizations who want to use this solution to verify degrees can also register themselves.
Is it authentic?
Blockchain was designed to bring trust to a trust-less system this was done very cleverly in its original design with bitcoin where each transactions had to be mined by a third-party that did not know who the transaction came from or where it was going. All they did was secure the network by providing computing power and solving a mathematical puzzle and were rewarded accordingly.
Certify.pk software allows the sender party to push the transaction hash to the blockchain which is mined and written to blockchain by third-party which can be anyone running the nodes on blockchain. The push is done by a university which will have a private key say sort of a password which is unique and is multisig enabled. So until and unless 2 parties sign (this is what multisig means) the transaction from the university end with their private keys the degree can’t be pushed onto the blockchain.
This also becomes the unique identifier for that university, so anyone can check if the degree was pushed onto blockchain by university or some other party. Certify.pk systems are deployed and hosted with clients which further ensures that they don’t have any control over the keys they have.
Is that All ?
The scope of Certify.pk is quite larger than just universities, it can be implemented in #fintech, insurtech, healthtech, or regtech. The idea is to provide a system to any entity to push its documents to blockchain and also allow for live view of all transactions and since all documents can now be pushed digitally to the blockchain through the system the physical paperwork can be eliminated.
The prospects of such a solution are huge once you start using a digital notary for verification with time stamping on an open ledger it can never be edited, or changed or modified hence allowing complete transparency to all parties. Universities around the world have already started using this.