The CertiUni Foundation, aiming to increase the assurance and features of its academic programs, has decided to incorporate the security provided by the Blockchain technology into its certificates, hand in hand with the Spanish company BlockTac. In doing so, it becomes one of the first European institution to provide these services to its users and at a large scale.

The CertiUni Foundation is the reference entity certifying personal and professional competences in Spain and Latin America; founded in 2014, has certified more than 10,000 candidates in the areas of ICT, Languages, Business Management and Personal Competences.

From now on, all academic certifications issued by the CertiUni Foundation will be cryptographically registered in one of the most used Blockchain networks (BTC, ETH) in the world. In this way, any certificate can be immediately authenticated against its digital signature stored in the Blockchain, verifying wether the certificate is genuine or not.

In this way, the CertiUni Foundation advances in the fight against fraud in Academic Certifications, a serious concern in some areas of the world and that until now did not have a simple solution. The occurrence of manipulated certificates of Academic Institutions or directly invented in job offers and access tests could not be a voided with the systems actually in place. used until now. Neither the greater physical security of the paper support used in certificates, nor the verification requirements by the issuer institution (re-certification), are capable of avoiding fraud.

From now on, any person or institution may verify wether the Academic Certificates presented by an alleged student and issued by the CertiUni Foundation are authentic or not. And this verification is carried out without the direct participation of the CertiUni Foundation, through the use of standard tools, also made available by BlockTac. The student will receive a digital copy of the certificate that can be shared with whomever he wishes, and that is unforgeable.

The use of the most important blockchain networks (with more than 10,000 nodes in BTC and more than 30,000 in ETH), makes the verification of academic certificates issued by CertiUni Foundation available at any time, even in the hypothetical case of catastrophes that eliminate the telematic networks or the disappearance of the academic institution that issued it (as recently happened in Syria).

This advance in the services offered by the CertiUni Foundation in partnership with BlockTac, is in line with the recommendations made by the European Commission to increase the use of Blockchain Technology in Education, issued in the last quarter 2017.

The new certification system will be included from now on to the new Academic Certificates of the CertiUni Foundation, and will be available for those certificates issued previously at the request of the interested holders.