AlgoCert: Adopt Non-transferable NFT for the Issuance and Verification of Educational Certificates using Algorand Blockchain

In addition to tanking the economy and society, credential fraud frequently damages the credibility of higher education. As the majority of conventional verification and issuance procedures are arduous, expensive, and obsolete, fraud has proliferated in numerous forms, ranging from paper-based counterfeit certificates to replicas enabled by database manipulation, and has reached exponential quantities. In this paper, the authors propose AlgoCert, a comprehensive credential verification solution that incorporates blockchain, self-sovereign identity (SSI), and decentralized identifier (DID) to introduce a more proficient, attack-resistant system that is user-friendly as well as effective at reducing widespread credential fraud. In addition, AlgoCert leverages stateful smart contracts on the Algorand blockchain and non-transferable non-fungible tokens (NFT), and neither students nor organizations are required to handle credentials in order to use the system. This paper provides a prototype of our solution and detail our attempts to develop a verification service with features, including data security, transcript authentication, and selective data disclosure.