Standards
Open Badges 3.0 vs 2.0 — what changes for institutions
Every OB 2.0 badge issued today will be migrated eventually. Here's what the 3.0 data model gets right, what Credly and Accredible are doing about it, and why the window to differentiate on OB 3.0 is closing.
Open Badges 3.0 is not an incremental upgrade. It's a fundamental redesign of the data model — one that makes OB 3.0 badges a strict superset of W3C Verifiable Credentials. For institutions with OB 2.0 badges in production today, this is good news and an action item.
What changed
OB 2.0 used a proprietary IRI-based data model: each badge was a JSON object with specific field names, a custom signature scheme (Open Badges Signing 2.0), and no direct relationship to the broader W3C credential ecosystem. Badges from OB 2.0 couldn't be verified by a generic W3C VC verifier; they needed OB-2.0-aware tooling.
OB 3.0 discarded that model. Every OB 3.0 badge is a W3C Verifiable Credential — same @context array, same type array with VerifiableCredential plus OpenBadgeCredential, same proof formats. The semantic layer (what's inside credentialSubject) is OB-3.0-specific, but the envelope is generic W3C VC. This means an OB 3.0 badge verifies in any W3C VC verifier, any DID-aware wallet, any Blockcerts-compatible tool.
The practical upgrades matter too. credentialSubject.achievement.alignment is now multi-framework native — a single badge can map to ESCO and O*NET and custom taxonomies simultaneously. credentialSubject.evidence is a first-class array. credentialSubject.[result](/glossary/result) and credentialSubject.achievement.[resultDescription](/glossary/result-description) formalize scored outcomes. achievement.awardingBody makes the issuer-vs-awarding-body distinction explicit.
Where Credly and Accredible stand
Credly (now Pearson) is still Open Badges 2.0 in production as of 2026. Their migration to 3.0 is announced and under way, but the 70 million badges already issued to IBM, AWS, and Microsoft customers will need to be re-issued, reformatted, or dual-hosted. That's a migration project measured in years.
Accredible has partial OB 3.0 support. Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard Business School Online credentials are in the process of being OB-3.0-formatted. The schema is there; the full ecosystem alignment (wallets, verifiers, third-party importers) is not.
Sertifier, VerifyEd, Certopus, Certifier.io — all OB 2.0 in production. Migration announcements on some, no timeline on others.
Why this is a wedge
Institutions issuing credentials today have a choice: start in OB 2.0 and migrate later, or start in OB 3.0 and skip the migration. The migration cost is non-trivial — every badge reformat is a communications event, a wallet-compatibility check, and a potential breakage in downstream consumer tools.
LearnCoin is OB 3.0 native from day one. Every credential we've ever issued has the full OB 3.0 shape. There's no migration to plan because there's nothing to migrate.
The window to differentiate on "OB 3.0 native" closes when Credly completes its migration. Once the 800-pound gorilla is 3.0-compliant, the bullet becomes table stakes. Right now, though, it's a structural advantage that maps directly onto procurement-team priorities: "do we adopt a vendor that's already on the new standard, or one that's still on the old standard?"
What institutions should ask vendors
Three questions separate serious OB-3.0 support from marketing claims:
1. Show me the @context array of a signed credential. OB 3.0 requires the purl.imsglobal.org/spec/ob/v3p0/ context. If it's not there, it's not OB 3.0.
2. Is OpenBadgeCredential in the type array? The OB 3.0 spec requires this alongside VerifiableCredential. Missing = non-conformant.
3. Can you show a formal 1EdTech Conformance Test Suite result? That's the normative check. Structural conformance (the fields are there) is necessary; formal conformance is the proof.
LearnCoin answers yes to 1 and 2 today, with formal conformance (LRN-28) on the roadmap. Credly and Accredible answer mixed to all three depending on which badge class you're inspecting. Smaller vendors often answer maybe.
The bigger picture
The Open Badges standard moving onto W3C VC rails is part of a broader convergence. EUDI Wallet is built on W3C VC + OpenID4VCI. EBSI trusted-issuer accreditation is W3C VC-compatible. US federal-learner-record initiatives are adopting W3C VC. OB 3.0 is how the education world joins that convergence.
Institutions that pick OB 3.0-native infrastructure today aren't just getting a better badge format. They're positioning themselves to interoperate with EU-mandated wallets, federal credentialing initiatives, and AI-agent-readable resume systems without a migration event between now and then.
That's the institutional case for OB 3.0. And that's why LearnCoin made it a binding commitment from credential one.
For the anchoring layer underneath the credential format, see Why LearnCoin anchors on Base, not Bitcoin. For the economics that make OB 3.0 actually useful to recipients, see Per-verification billing is a trust violation.