Academic and skills credentialing using distributed ledger technology (DLT) and W3C Standards: Technology assessment

Abstract

The ongoing push for the 4th industrial revolution is setting the stage to digitise, persist and verify identity along with credentials. Academic and skills credentials are currently verified manually and have much scope for automation using cryptographic techniques but requires standardisation to facilitate future systems interoperability. The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Verifiable Credentials (VC) standards presents the possibility to achieve this credential verification automation. To accomplish this, an understanding of various DLTs and requirements for a viable skills tracking system is important. Therefore, this research aims to access the selected DLTs against the assessment criterion presented and an analysis has been completed to determine which DLT is suitable for the proposed system. The DLTs are assessed in terms of their ability to support the rapid prototyping of such a system and provide recommendations to guide a future development path from the perspective of standards compliance. We conclude that few DLTs possess the maturity to provide proper requirements coverage due to the emergent nature of the DLT space. Additionally, this paper presents the high-level requirements to achieve a minimally viable solution that can demonstrate such digital credential verification in the academic and skills tracking context.