Beyond the Memes- How One NFT is Changing the Post Student Experience…AGAIN!

I felt like the original paper that I had posted describing the reasoning behind creating non-transferable Certificate NFT’s for my Blockchain course needed to be updated. The original article can be found here, but since the Coursera Blockchain Certificate for the class of December 2021 was minted, a lot has changed. Most notably, a lot more people now appreciate the value of possessing a non-transferable NFT to prove receipt of educational credentials. In fact, I’ve heard rumors of some skinny programmer named “Vitalik” talking about this happening in the near future — wow does this mean the future is already here?

Once again, we created the NFT’s for the latest graduates, and when I say “we” I mean that the heavy lifting was done by David Eiber and Corbin Page at Paymagic, as exact duplicates of the certificates they receive from Coursera. However, these can be shared, and the URL provided to employers or others.

I’ve been asked about the nature of the non-transferable NFT’s and if this represents a future killer application for NFTs, given the popularity of using these for other purposes. I honestly can’t speak to every use of these types of tokens, but I do know that the application for mitigating diploma and certificate fraud is already being realized.

As I mentioned previously, my hope is that this work inspires other institutions to look at “NFT diplomas” as an alternative or in parallel with traditional academic validators. In addition, there is an application for professional designations (e.g., CLEs that professionals need to complete on a regular basis). Again, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, as I can’t imagine an academic institution not wanting to at least consider this application of new technology. Here’s the Polygon link to check out the latest certificates.