Credentials that outlive the platform

I've been building in EdTech since 2015. Ten years of watching the same pattern repeat. The institutions that take curiosity seriously — universities that let students show what they actually did, employers that want real evidence of skill, platforms that care about what a learner produced and not just which module they finished — keep running into the same wall. Credentials. The trust layer between "this happened" and "someone believed it."

That layer has been slow, expensive, and stiff for as long as I've worked in this field. A university spends years earning accreditation, then issues degrees on paper their graduates can't cryptographically share. A bootcamp ships certificates that live in a private portal that dies when the bootcamp dies. A learner's proudest project — the capstone, the industry challenge, the mentor-reviewed output — ends up on a personal website the recruiter never checks. Every handoff between issuer and verifier loses information and adds friction.

Meanwhile the surrounding stack has moved on. We can ship real-time video across continents for less than a cent. We can sign a software release with a hardware-backed key and watch the world's verifiers trust it without asking permission. We can settle billion-dollar transactions on a public ledger in 12 seconds. Every adjacent problem has been solved, commoditised, and forgotten. Institutional credentialing has barely moved.

The pattern

Here is what I've watched happen, at roughly one institution per year, for a decade.

An organisation decides to take credentials seriously. They pick a vendor — Credly, Accredible, Sertifier, sometimes a custom build. They issue badges for a year or three. The vendor gets acquired (Credly → Pearson), or pivots, or raises prices, or decommissions a feature. The institution's credentials are now partially stranded. Recipients who earned them five years ago visit verification URLs that 404, or they discover their badge class has been "archived" and won't render on LinkedIn. The institution says "we'll migrate" and silently doesn't, because migration is painful and the next budget cycle has bigger fires.

The credentials don't survive the platform. That is the single pattern underneath every credentialing incident I have seen. Whoever owns the verification endpoint owns the credential — and the thing the recipient thought they earned was, in the end, a rental.

What if credentials could outlive the platform

This is the premise of everything I'm now building. A credential should be verifiable twenty years from now, on the open internet, with tooling nobody has yet written, without any particular company's servers being online. Not because any one company will last twenty years — most won't — but because the trust substrate itself is open and public.

That premise is only recently achievable. Three things converged inside the last 36 months, and that is the window we're shipping into.

First, the standards. W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 went to Recommendation in 2025. Open Badges 3.0 is now a strict superset of W3C VC — every OB 3.0 badge is a W3C credential, parseable by any W3C-aware verifier. Blockcerts v3 extends that with a public-chain anchor commitment. For the first time in the credentialing field, we have a shared envelope that isn't owned by any vendor.

Second, the economics. Anchoring a credential batch to Ethereum L1 costs dollars per batch. Anchoring the same batch to a modern L2 like Base costs a fraction of a cent. For the first time in a decade of watching the credential-economics problem, the marginal cost of verification has collapsed to effectively zero. A credential costs cents to sign and publish once; it costs nothing to verify for decades.

Third, the regulation. From December 2026, every EU Member State must offer its citizens an EUDI Wallet. From 2027, regulated services — including education — must accept credentials through it. Universities that were happy to email PDFs will soon be required to hand credentials to a wallet. The procurement question has shifted from "should we modernise" to "what do we modernise onto."

What we are building

LearnCoin is a managed service for exactly this problem. Your institution keeps issuing credentials to your learners. We sign each credential with a hardware-backed key, batch it with other credentials from the same window, compute a Merkle root, and anchor that root on Base. The verification URL we publish belongs to your domain if you want it; your brand sits on the credential, not ours. Every credential we publish can be verified by generic W3C VC tooling, any Blockcerts-compatible wallet, and any Open Badges 3.0 importer — including ones that don't exist yet.

We are invisible infrastructure. The university stays the issuer. The student stays the owner. The verifier — recruiter, registrar, border official — gets a cryptographic answer they can trust without asking us or anyone else. That is the end state credentials should always have had.

Three commitments we refuse to soften

1. Verification is free, forever, for anyone. No account, no quota, no per-check fee. We charge issuers, never verifiers or recipients. This is in the Terms of Service as a binding clause, because a credential that costs money to check is not a credential.

2. Open standards, not proprietary moats. Every credential we sign is readable by generic W3C VC, Open Badges 3.0, and Blockcerts v3 tooling. If LearnCoin vanishes tomorrow, your credentials keep working. That is the design, not an accident — and it is also the escape hatch written into the contract.

3. [Issuer](/glossary/issuer) brand, not ours. A LearnCoin-signed credential issued by a university shows the university's identity above the fold. "Cryptographically verified by LearnCoin" is a footnote next to the checkmark. Your students know they earned something from you — not from an infrastructure vendor they've never heard of.

Why this is worth writing now

Because the window is short. The OB 3.0 adoption advantage closes when Credly finishes migrating. The EUDI procurement cycle closes when European universities sign multi-year vendor agreements. The standards converged; the economics converged; the regulation landed. The next year is when institutions decide whether to modernise onto open standards or rent their credentials from another closed platform for another decade.

I've watched the closed-platform cycle three times. I'm not interested in running the fourth. LearnCoin is the credential infrastructure I wish had existed the first day I worked in this industry — open, permanent, verifier-free, built on standards the open web can extend.

If you run an institution that issues credentials, or if you build a platform that does, talk to us. We'll help you integrate in days. And whatever credentials we sign together will still be verifiable when the current cohort's grandchildren go looking for them.

For the technical side of how this works, read Why LearnCoin anchors on Base, not Bitcoin. For the format choice, read Open Badges 3.0 vs 2.0 — what changes for institutions. For the economics, read Per-verification billing is a trust violation.

— Aharon