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Authenticating academic certificates on the Bitcoin blockchain

Holberton School recently announced a partnership with [Bitproof](https://bitproof.io/), becoming the world's first school to deliver academic certificates secured and accessible via the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoins.

Employers face a major hiring hurdle, verifying information on a candidate’s resume. A survey by one of the largest online job finder sites, CareerBuilder, shows that a staggering 58 percent of employers have caught a lie on a resume. The site has more than 23 million unique visitors and over 1.6 million jobs.

“Trust is very important in professional relationships, and by lying on your resume, you breach that trust from the very outset. If you want to enhance your resume, it’s better to focus on playing up tangible examples from your actual experience. Your resume doesn’t necessarily have to be the perfect fit for an organization, but it needs to be relevant and accurate.”
—  – Rosemary Haefner,  CareerBuilder Vice President of Human Resources

Just over half of employers, 51 percent, said that they would automatically dismiss a candidate once caught. Only seven percent said they would be willing to overlook a lie, if they liked the candidate.

"Lying about education credentials is a common problem, and today it is very easy to counterfeit academic diplomas and certificates.”
—  – Blake Haggerty, CoreOS Recruiter

A separate report on the 2015 hiring outlook by HireRight, a company offering global background checks, drug testing, and employment verification services, shows that screening uncovered lies or misrepresentations on a resume for 86% of employers.

Whether looking at CareerBuilding or HireRight results, there is no doubt that lying on resumes is a common problem. The longer it takes to verify resume credentials, the less efficient the hiring process, costing employers time and money.

The HireRight report revealed that 50% of employers check education verification. To make academic verification easy for employers, a school for software engineers has taken the initiative. Holberton School is to become the first academic institution to authenticate its academic certificates on the bitcoin blockchain,.

"The blockchain is the future of certification, and we believe that in the following years, more schools will use the public blockchain to secure their certificates and diplomas. It is much more efficient, secure, and simple than what you can find today in the industry. We think first about our students — we want to make sure that our certificates will always remain valid and verifiable by employers. It will also keep them safe and impossible to copy or hack."
— – Sylvain Kalache, Holberton School Co-Founder

The school, named after early software engineering pioneer Betty Holberton, was officially launched on October 11, and is currently accepting applicants for its first class, at the downtown San Francisco campus, in January 2016.

"Holberton School offers a truly innovative approach to education: focus on building reliable applications and scalable systems, take on real-world challenges, collaborate with your peers. A school every software engineer would have dreamt of!"
— – Kate Volkova, Microsoft Sr. Software Engineer and Holberton School Mentor

On completion of the course students will be issued a digital certificate, alongside the traditional paper one. The digital copy is stored on the blockchain through a partnership with Bitproof, a California-based startup specializing in the process, and can be accessed through any blockchain explorer.

The digital certificate will be issued in a secure environment, using 256 bits encrypted private key and two-factor authentication to access the interface that will generate, sign and insert the certificate into the Bitcoin blockchain. This environment makes the certificate’s content sealed and tamper-proof.

“The process to check someone’s degree is quite laborious, as you need to get the school’s contact information, reach the right person and do it again for every candidate. Medium and big companies often delegate this task to third parties as it’s very time and money consuming."
— – Blake Haggerty, CoreOS Recruiter

While Bitproof is one of the most advanced iterations of a public use Blockchain Timestamping service, schools that want to use the blockchain for certification purposes have a wide range of choices. ProofofExistence offers an API for advanced automation, BlockSign has an advanced PDF signing capability, and OriginStamp has zero fees and allows for a wide array of data formats.

The typical process for storing a document on the blockchain involves inserting a cryptographic hash into a bitcoin transaction. While this means that the original is not physically stored, it provides evidence that a document existed at a specific point in time.

No matter which timestamping service is used, students’ certificates can then be authenticated with any public blockchain explorer, such as Blockchain.info, Blocktrail, or Bitproof’s sister site Merkle. This check should only take potential employers a few minutes to check, providing proof that a candidate is truly a graduate from the school they claim to be.

"The blockchain is well known for storing bitcoins transactions because it’s a decentralized, authenticated and hardened against tampering storage systems. Naturally, it also makes a perfect place to store academic certificates."
— – Louison Dumont, Bitproof Founder

In the US, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) forecasts that in fall 2015, approximately 20.2 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities, and the number will keep rising year-on-year. In addition, there are diplomas and other certificates that are not included in the NCES number. Although not all attendees will graduate, a large number will, most will apply for jobs, and employers will then need to verify their information.

According to The US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, individuals held an average of 11.7 jobs from ages 18 to 48, with nearly half of these jobs held before age 25. This means for each graduate there would potentially be at least 12 employers needing to verify their information, on average. Using the blockchain to store information that is easily accessible to employers will help them with hiring efficiency, as well as lower their cost and time spent hiring.


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