(Article first published by Computer Sweden, 2021)

Nackademin is an education provider headquartered in Stockholm, offering vocational higher education programs (YH-utbildningar) in fields including IT. Its programs run in both Stockholm and Uppsala for more than 3,000 students each year. Nackademin has now — through the company TRUE — introduced a system in which diplomas, course certificates, and other credentials are issued digitally and published on the Ethereum blockchain. The goal is threefold: to protect the authenticity of the credentials, to save administrative costs around issuance, and to generate more attention for the programs Nackademin offers.

"In a normal year we'd spend at least two weeks issuing the credentials. With the new digital system and the blockchain, we're saving a huge amount of time, we can guarantee the authenticity of the credentials, and we drive a lot of traffic back to our site when students share their diplomas on social media."

— Peter Hampus, CIO at Nackademin

Before the digital system was introduced, Nackademin's administrators spent significant time issuing the credentials. The diplomas were created digitally, then printed and manually signed by two people, then scanned back into a digital format. The diplomas were then mailed to each student's registered address — which created problems, since many students don't actually live at their registered address.

PDFs aren't tamper-evident enough

Nackademin started by looking at the PDF format — a natural choice for digital documents. But Peter Hampus argues there's a major problem around diploma fraud, and that PDFs simply aren't reliable enough as legal proof.

"Forged diplomas are becoming more and more common — from universities as well as vocational programs — and on top of that there's a lot of carelessness. Employers, for instance, often don't follow up to actually verify that a credential is authentic."

— Peter Hampus, CIO at Nackademin

Peter Hampus was introduced to the Swedish company TRUE, which has built a SaaS solution that uses blockchain specifically to secure credentials, certificates, and other important documents.

"We're a young company, but we've already tested our solution across different customers and markets. It's clear that education is an area that needs to strengthen the security around credentials and certificates. Since this spring we've been helping Nackademin with all kinds of credentials — diplomas, qualifications, course certificates, to name a few."

— Patrik Slettman, Founder of TRUE

Published on Ethereum

TRUE's solution creates a cryptographic hash of each credential. That hash — and only the hash — is published as a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, via a smart contract that TRUE creates for each customer. The customer owns the smart contract, and credential hashes can only be published by the customer the contract belongs to.

"For each credential we generate a hash, and it's the hash that's published publicly on Ethereum. We've developed a smart contract that receives the hashes and stores them on the blockchain, including an expiry date so you can tell if a credential is still valid. If anything in the credential is changed, the hash changes, and the system catches it."

— Victor Wallander, CTO at TRUE

Drives traffic to Nackademin

Both Nackademin and TRUE emphasise the upside that the digital credentials generate traffic back to Nackademin's site. When students publish their credentials on social media, that creates traffic to Nackademin at a factor of roughly ten per credential. With close to a thousand credentials issued so far, that's resulted in more than 10,000 page views.

"The credentials are displayed on a subpage of Nackademin's site. That drives traffic to their site at roughly ten times the number of credentials issued. They can also see statistics for where credentials are shared, how many clicks they generate, and so on — something no school has been able to do before."

— Patrik Slettman, Founder of TRUE

"As far as I know, we're the first school in Sweden using this technology."

— Peter Hampus, CIO at Nackademin

"I'm absolutely certain we can save organisations a huge amount of money through automated credential issuance — while giving them a product that's always available, can't be lost, and can always be verified as authentic."

— Patrik Slettman, Founder of TRUE