Credentials
Awarding body
Also known as: credentialSubject.achievement.awardingBody
The Open Badges 3.0 field identifying the institution that actually granted the achievement — distinct from the cryptographic issuer.
Open Badges 3.0 introduced the achievement.awardingBody field to formalize a distinction that OB 2.0 and early W3C VC deployments conflated: the entity that cryptographically signs the credential versus the entity that actually awards the achievement. In a multi-tenant SaaS model they're rarely the same.
LearnCoin is always the cryptographic issuer (did:web:learncoin.me). The awarding body is the tenant — Ewance, Challenge University, an individual institution. The awarding body name, URL, and optional logo appear in credentialSubject.achievement.awardingBody and render on the public verification page as the institution doing the awarding, while LearnCoin is credited as the cryptographic infrastructure underneath.
Today, awardingBody is present in LearnCoin credentials as display metadata but not yet cryptographically committed to the signed JSONLD — the current OB 3.0 v3.0.3 context doesn't canonicalize it under URDNA2015 safe-mode. When the LearnCoin extension context publishes, awardingBody moves into the signed document proper.
Related terms