Head to head
LearnCoin vs Credly (Pearson)
The 800-pound gorilla of digital badging — around 70 million badges issued, IBM / AWS / Microsoft customers, now owned by Pearson.
This is a structural comparison — same axes evaluated against both platforms, with a candid note on who each is the better fit for. Reviewed 2026-04-20.
LearnCoin
Verifiable-credential infrastructure. W3C VC 2.0 + Blockcerts v3 + Open Badges 3.0 native, anchored on Ethereum L2 (Base).
- Founded
- 2026 · Tallinn, Estonia
- Open Badges
- OB 3.0 native from day one
- Trust anchor
- Public blockchain (Base L2)
- Verification
- Free, forever, for anyone (contractual)
Credly (Pearson)
The 800-pound gorilla of digital badging — around 70 million badges issued, IBM / AWS / Microsoft customers, now owned by Pearson.
- Founded
- 2012
- Ownership
- Acquired by Pearson (2022)
- Scale
- ~70M badges issued; Fortune 500 customer base
- OB status
- Still on OB 2.0
- Blockchain
- Non-blockchain
- Verification
- Free for individual checks via the public URL; programmatic / high-volume verification requires enterprise agreement.
Side-by-side comparison
Same axes, different answers. Each row cites the observable fact as of 2026-04-20.
| Axis | LearnCoin | Credly (Pearson) | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Badges version | OB 3.0 native from day one. Every credential declares OpenBadgeCredential in type and uses the OB 3.0 v3.0.3 context. | Open Badges 2.0 in production; OB 3.0 migration in progress, no firm completion date. | A 70M-badge migration is a multi-year project. Customers who start on LearnCoin skip the migration event entirely. |
| Trust anchor | Public-blockchain anchored (Base, Ethereum L2 via OP Stack). MerkleProof2019 proof chain is independent of LearnCoin's servers. | Centralized Credly database. Verification depends on Credly.com resolving the badge URL. | If Pearson exits the credentialing business or shuts down Credly, historical badges lose their verification endpoint. LearnCoin credentials continue to verify as long as Base and Ethereum exist. |
| Verification economics | Verification is free, forever, for anyone. Contractual commitment. Public pages, no account, no throttling. | Free for one-off verification via the public URL. Programmatic / high-volume verification requires enterprise agreement. | At recruiter or ATS scale, programmatic verification against Credly requires a commercial arrangement. Against LearnCoin it does not. |
| Issuer identity | W3C did:web issuer DID with per-tenant verificationMethod fragments. Every credential cryptographically traceable to the tenant's signing key. | Proprietary issuer registry controlled by Credly. Issuer identity is not a W3C DID. | OB 3.0 + W3C VC tooling expects DID-based issuer identity. Credly's model requires custom integration. |
| Skill framework support | OB 3.0 alignment[] with any combination of ESCO, O*NET, Lightcast, CEASN, or custom frameworks. Multi-framework in one credential. | Credly Skills taxonomy — proprietary. Maps to external frameworks but one at a time. | A LearnCoin credential can be consumed by a European ESCO-aware verifier and a US O*NET-aware verifier from the same signed document. |
| Recipient wallet | Compatible with any Blockcerts-compatible wallet (iOS, Android, web). Planned: EUDI Wallet alignment via OpenID4VCI. | Credly-native recipient profile. No standards-based wallet support as of 2026. | EUDI Wallet mandates are coming for EU public-sector credentialing. LearnCoin's path there is a feature addition; Credly's is a data-model migration. |
Choose LearnCoin if
- You need credentials that continue to verify if your vendor exits the business.
- You plan to interoperate with EU EUDI Wallet, EBSI, or OpenID4VCI.
- You want programmatic verification at scale without an enterprise agreement.
- You're issuing fewer than 1,000,000 credentials per year and care about OB 3.0 conformance.
Choose Credly (Pearson) if
- You already have 100,000+ badges on Credly and the migration cost outweighs the benefit.
- You need LinkedIn's deepest native integration and can accept OB 2.0 semantics for another 12-24 months.
- You're issuing at IBM / AWS / Microsoft scale and Credly's operational maturity at that volume is a hard requirement.
Other comparisons
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