The University of Basel has become the first university in Switzerland to announce that it will issue graduation diplomas backed by Blockchain technology.
Specifically, the Blockchain Proxeus firm partnered with the Center for Innovative Finance (CIF) of the University of Basel, to create a prototype that allows the institution to issue academic certificates for its courses and register them in a chain of blocks.
In effect, the prototype was created, the processing time of the documents was drastically reduced, and the University of Basel became the first in the country to issue this type of documents with Blockchain technology. Fabian Schar, administrative director of the CIF, said that this project will help solve the problems of authenticity in academic certificates. In this regard, he emphasized:
Fraud is a problem in the academy, as it is in any field (...) by securing certificates in Blockchain, we provide an extra layer of security for graduates and potential employers. These certificates can not be falsified and can be easily verified online.
Likewise, Schar said that the diplomas issued through Blockchain represent a new paradigm for security and offer value both to employers, who avoid wasting time in verifying these documents, as well as to academic institutions and graduates, who are usually the most affected with respect to their reputation.
In this way, the University of Basel joins other institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which announced the issuance of more than 100 graduates' diplomas last year; or the government of Malta, which also revealed in 2017 its plans to issue academic certificates based on the block chain.
Previously, Proxeus had already developed Blockchain-based solutions for this sector, with the collaboration of companies such as IBM. One of the goals of this firm is to reduce the time used by Swiss companies in their tax registration process. In fact, they have managed to reduce it from six weeks to less than three hours thanks to Blockchain.