Secure Certs: Blockchain for eliminating certificate fraud.

The global pandemic has made it impossible to get education in conventional ways at-least for the year 2020-21. Education institutions, International conferences and workshops are being conducted online. People usually attend these events to gain knowledge which can be used to improve their career prospectus. The certificates issued for these events are now digital. The absence of a secure storage space and a swift way to verify the authenticity of the certificates is resulting is certificate fraud.

Organizations are storing certificates in database so that they can be verified by external entities. Digitally storing a certificate in a database has its own issues. The servers can be compromised and the data stored in the database can be manipulated. If that happens, the authenticity of all certificates issued by the organization will always be questioned.

Creating a decentralized application (dApp)based on blockchain can solve these problems. Once the certification data is stored in blockchain, they become immutable. The data can be retrieved and verified any number of times at almost zero cost. As the certificate verification becomes instantaneous and free of cost, there will be no incentive for people to do certificate fraud.

With the vision of eliminating certificate fraud and identity theft in India, we have launched https://securecerts.in/. It is a dApp based on algorand blockchain network. The organizations can join as issuers. They can create separate events and upload customized details for each of event. Certification text for each certificate can be added and customized as per issuers requirement. Once the critical parts of the certificate is stored in the blockchain, it cannot be altered. This provides a solution for safely issuing digital certificates across the country.