The EdTech Talents project (Project: 101119689 — EdTech Talents — HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-TALENTS-03) aims to make education and technology
work together better in Estonia, Hungary, and Serbia. We want to
help academic and support staff in these countries learn from
successful EdTech companies in Austria, Germany, and Spain. At the
same time, researchers from these advanced countries will share
their expertise and knowledge with EdTech companies in Estonia,
Hungary, and Serbia. We’re doing this by giving guidance and
training so that good ideas and knowledge can flow between
everyone involved. This lines up with a bigger plan for
cooperation and talent circulation between different sectors and
countries to make education and business connections stronger.
As a part of this project a blockchain based solution for validating university degrees has been developed.
In today’s global labor market—where international mobility is increasingly common—the ability to reliably verify academic degrees is more important than ever. However, existing degree-validation processes remain largely national, slow, and manual, often involving notaries and certified translators.
These procedures provide limited assurance to employers, since notaries typically verify only that a submitted copy matches the original document, rather than confirming the authenticity of the degree itself.
At the same time, universities—the actual issuers of academic credentials—generally lack accessible and user-friendly systems that allow third parties to verify degrees directly. This gap leaves employers without a high-confidence method to authenticate candidates’ qualifications and opens the door for fraudulent use of invalid or falsified degrees.
This project proposes a blockchain-based solution designed to address these challenges. By leveraging the inherent security, immutability, and transparency of blockchain technology, the system enables secure storage of degree-related data on-chain. The process of adding new degree records requires consensus among validators, ensuring that only legitimate data is accepted and recorded.
By returning control over degree validation to the issuing universities, this approach strengthens the overall reliability of academic credentials. Universities benefit from enhanced protection against misuse of fraudulent degrees, which in turn safeguards their institutional reputation.
The envisioned solution includes a publicly accessible web interface where employers, institutions, and other stakeholders can easily verify the authenticity of any submitted degree. This creates a streamlined, trustworthy, and highly secure ecosystem for academic credential validation in a globally connected world. The code for the solutions could be found on GitHub (link at the bottom).
