- Certificate tooling protocol will use IOTA’s Tangle
- Certificates will be issued automatically and cannot be forged
- IOTA continues its journey towards mass adoption
The IOTA Foundation has created a new protocol for its certification tooling with an API that’s open for third party use. They will base the certificates on IOTA’s Distributed Ledger Technology and other-than-blockchain alternative, the Tangle. The announcement by the Foundation’s Director of partner Management Holger Koether via twitter said the certification tooling protocol is tamper-proof because they are based on the Tangle.
Guaranteeing integrity with IOTA
That DLT-based certificates cannot be forged ensures that certificates issued by educational institutions after the completion of different courses cannot be forged, guaranteeing their integrity. According to the foundation, certificates will be issued automatically through an API as soon as a participant completes a course. Koether explained:
“I am excited to share that we have upgraded the IOTA certification tooling with an API and will make it available for a 3rd party without cost. This means that we invite any university, corporate or other institution to create and immutably secure their own certificates on the IOTA Tangle, including their own custom design.”
Counterfeit Degree Certificates
Fake diplomas and degrees have become a big problem and the internet is awash with websites offering counterfeit degree certificates from made-up universities. According to 2015 BBC research, a particular website had made over 200,000 fake certificates and made at least £37 million in the process.
With the e-learning market booming, it is expected that by the year 2025 the fake degree certificate market will be worth a whopping $300 billion. Organizations that hire employees are at odds on how to verify certification. Several notable Universities across the globe such as Cornell University, Duke University, New York University, Princeton University and the oldest Catholic university in the United States, Georgetown University, are already using blockchain technology to offer their degree certificates, and this is where IOTA’s Tangle comes into play.
The Tangle is the moniker used to describe IOTA’s directed acyclic graph (DAG) based transaction settlement and data integrity layer focused on the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The Tangle is essentially a string of individual transactions that are interlinked to each other and stored through a decentralized network of node participants. The Tangle is designed to offer a solution to the heterogeneous nature of current blockchain systems.
The tangle is referred to as a ‘next generation distributed ledger’ where the businesses that benefit from the technology would actually serve as nodes on the network. IOTA already has an impressive list of partners including Alxy, Primority, and many others. The entry of educational institutions is yet another sign that IOTA is on its way to mass adoption.