[IDEATION HACKATHON] Supporting degree/credential authentication

Ecosystem NFT Onboarding
1

With NFT Degrees, you can receive your university/college degree (or current student) as an NFT and use it for discounts, perks, and validation.

Problem:

  1. Difficult and cumbersome to verify a degree

  2. Many companies and places attempt to offer rewards for eligible students/alumni but there is no official way other than to call the university itself to verify if someone holds a degree. This can also be very difficult to verify due to privacy reasons (the school doesn’t allow just anyone to contact them).

  3. Difficult to offer discounts to students

  • There are many degrees and the degree is not often public. What if I wanted to target Dental students/graduates?

  1. Inconvenient to carry around a paper degree, can be lost, or destroyed

  2. Poor interoperability and susceptible to hacks across institutions

  3. Each institution has its own database and their connections to other vendors/platforms need to be integrated uniquely for each one

  4. Institution’s servers could be hacked at anytime, compromising other student’s degrees

Solution - NFT Degrees:

Upon graduation or enrolment to an institution, the student is given an NFT generated by the official institution. Students can redeem this NFT to their wallets and use it to verify their status at the institution. When a company wants to verify the status of the student, the student would give permission on their wallet to allow a certain website/company to see this information. Once the student permits access, then the company can check if that particular NFT was officially minted by that institution on a public explorer/API to NFT Degrees or blockchain explorer.

Tech:

Private - Web-app dashboard for institutions to manage and mint NFTs

  • Typescript, React

Public - API or explorer dashboard to verify the address of an NFT

Real world implementations:

  1. Job recruiters/HR to validate the degree in seconds to prevent fraud

  2. Reducing time-to-hire and costs of checks, improving overall efficiency in the screening process and checks, reduce/eliminate manpower to conduct/support global screening

  3. Student Security

  4. students can permanently protect their study achievements, assist apprentices to authenticate their apprenticeship qualifications and support their employers in running educational background checks quickly, efficiently, and reliably

  5. Discounts/rewards for specific alumni/students

  6. Can be targeted based on type of degree attained for example, discounts to only Dental students

  7. Method to verify membership to a school club event, online membership, alumni/student restricted websites and organizations

  8. Use a decentralized with the most up-to-date data to validate the credentials to eliminate fraud

  9. Method to provide discount bus passes to students

  10. Insurance companies to offer incentives for school alumni

  11. Future use case: companies and other organizations. For example if you’re an employee for Amazon, you can verify your credentials either for internal uses or external uses

  12. For internal employee verification badges

  13. For external use cases for vendors/authentication

  14. Within the school, badges/rewards can be offered to gamify and incentivize learning

  15. One API/Platform to increase interoperability, so integrations to other vendors is made incredibly easy.

Project Presentation: WIP

Project Video: WIP

Project Git Repo: WIP

Near account:

stanford1.near

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