Decentralizing Certificates Issuance Through Blockchain

When the monetary or financial value is not take into account in blockchain, there is still room for a digital ledger system for universities. As in any institution, universities have processes defined in a unique way, involving many verification steps. Issuance of end-of-course certificates requires fulfillment of multiple requirements, i.e. signatures from authorities, instructors and in some cases administrative staff. This work presents an initial work for certificates issuance using blockchain for education purposes. We generate a prototype including no signature but registered nodes to record transactions over the infrastructure generated for the Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion or SELI project. This prototype records certificates in a private non-monetary blockchain network, and is provided as an open source project. Countries like Ecuador, Turkey, Uruguay, and Finland can share certificates from the SELI platform through local nodes. This article provides relevant details about the implementation of the system, always with the aim of reusing existing software to reduce implementation time. The main result is that the project has generated a simple international university network with three countries for the exchange of certificates.