Possible On-Chain Template for the CBCA Alpha Program Certificates

English Education
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Hey Cardano!

Hope everyone is doing well. I have seen a lot of amazing things coming out of the Cardano Foundation’s Cardano Blockchain Certified Associate (CBCA) Alpha Program. Cheers to everyone who has worked on this, including all of the organizers and the participants.

A topic came up during the Messari Q1 Report today regarding the certificates from this program, and I asked if they would eventually become on-chain assets. Frederik Gregaard was kind enough to note that while they are not yet, friends at the Foundation are working to make this possible.

As such, I wanted to share a draft template I made for fun in imagining what these certificates might look like on the Cardano blockchain. The tinyurl links below are versions of the certificates on the pool.pm metadata editor.

Public:
Here is an example of a CBCA Certificate if it was minted as a native asset. In this case, an NFT: https://tinyurl.com/CBCAap

IMG_3282

As you can see here, all of the important information from the certificate is included in the metadata of the NFT. Included are the type of certificate, what it is (in recognition of), issuer, recipient, certificate ID, date, and relevant links to the Foundation and the CBCA program. Even the asset name follows a potentially useful pattern being named “CBCA_Certificate_123456,” in order to indicate the Program > Document Type > Document Number." In addition to this on-chain information, there is an IPFS-hosted image file of the certificate and a PDF version that have been included.

Private:
As some individuals may want a degree of privacy on a public ledger like Cardano, I also made an encrypted draft as well: https://tinyurl.com/CBCAprivate

[I tried to upload a second screenshot here, but my account is too new for more than one media file. View it in the comments.]

From this version, you can see it accounts for the same information, but a few things have been changed. Importantly, the individual’s name has been removed from the on-chain metadata. Additionally, instead of the certificate document being the main media file of the asset, it has been replaced with a general logo/graphic for the CBCA program. The PDF, in this version, is a password-protected encrypted PDF that was made private using Adobe Acrobat. If you would like to view it, the password is: CBCA2023. For individuals who receive an encrypted/private version, they could receive their certificate passwords from the Foundation upon program completion.

Production:
If the Foundation was to issue CBCA Certificates as native assets, there could be a specific Policy ID to mint all of the assets. Ideally, this Policy ID would be posted on the Foundation website to verify that only assets under this ID are those certifying completion of the program.

For both of these native-asset templates, the cost of production is very minimal for minting onto the Cardano blockchain. With such a small size, minting one would take up approximately 981 bytes of data, or about 6% of what you can fit into a single minting transaction. If they were produced in bundles, approximately 20 CBCA NFTs would be very close to 16kb, or about 99% of what you could fit into a single minting transaction. The total cost of this would be about 2.7 to 3 ADA per bundle. IPFS image + document hosting is another cost consideration, but there are freely available hosting services such as NFT.storage, which utilizes the Filecoin network. Other third-party IPFS services are available, as well as running an IPFS node yourself to pin these data files. Community platforms like NMKR or BuffyBot publishing could very easily help with this aspect of production.

In Summary:
I am a big fan of combining blockchain and education, and am very excited to see so many people enjoying the CBCA program this year. I cannot wait until my schedule frees up sometime to complete it myself. Nevertheless, for the time being, I wanted to share some draft templates for what CBCA certificates might look like minted as on-chain assets. Feel free to use any/all of this template for your own personal or professional purposes. Curious to know what you think, and thank you to everyone cooking on Cardano!

With warm regards,
NOODZ

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IMG_3281

Here is the private/encrypted version I wanted to include in the original post. You can view the draft at https://tinyurl.com/CBCAprivate, and the password for the PDF is: CBCA2023.

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A NFT is a great way to display things. However, one issue I see with the certificate NFT is that it really needs to be linked to your identity and not be transferable.

Probably need to make it displayable using Atala prism???

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Actually, there is a way to verify that the holder of the certificate NFT was the individual who actually completed the course: You can verify the individual controls the wallet address that initially received the certificate NFT when issued by the Cardano Foundation.

But then there is no point in being able to transfer the NFT because the holder would still need to prove he controls the original receiving address. Of course this also relies on the assumption that the issuer, Cardano Foundation, properly checked the wallet address was controlled by the individual who completed the course before it issued the certificate NFT to that address.

For example, Cardano Foundation would need to stop the following: Someone could complete the course and then tell Cardano Foundation to issue the certificate NFT to someone else’s wallet address. This is analogous to the real world situation where a student pays an expert to sit an exam for them.

I think we need the functionality of Atala prism to address such concerns.

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I agree Atala is likely a better option, but am not as familiar with the mechanics of this system versus using native assets on the ledger. Isn’t AP also something tied to specific seed phrase, and if so, would have the same vulnerabilities as control over a wallet with the relevant NFT/Native Asset? Either way, I love this conversation, and am so excited in thinking about education supported by blockchain, and with Cardano in particular. I really appreciate your response and insights in your replies to this thread. Thank you so much!

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I don’t know just how capable Atala Prism is at present. There is a pioneers program being run currently.

Eventually, the way I see things working is as follows:

We control our own identity records through leveraging immutable, timestamped, and signed, records on the blockchain. These records are stored so that only the owner can view them and only the owner is enabled to selectively prove aspects about their identity or achievements using zero-knowledge proofs.

You could use this technology to authenticate for Govt, banking, health treatment, or anything requiring some proof about you, without the need to disclose everything about yourself. This would mean that all service providers you interact with wouldn’t need to store all of your identity data on their systems as they only need to be satisfied about the aspect of your identity they require. Eg: Do you have the right to access this bank account?, Are you over 18yrs old?, Are you a US resident?, Do you have a PHD in Physics?, etc.

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