Principal Investigator Mitchel Resnick
Co-investigator Jan Philipp Schmidt
Project Website http://certificates.media.mit.edu/
An incubation project by the Media Lab Learning Initiative and Learning Machine that builds an ecosystem for creating, sharing, and verifying blockchain-based educational certificates. Digital certificates are registered on the Bitcoin blockchain, cryptographically signed, and tamper proof. All code is open-source and we invite feedback, contributions, and general discussion.
The Media Lab will award certificates to members of our community that are outside of the academic program. Created by the Learning Learning initiative, the certificates are registered on the blockchain, cryptographically signed, and tamper proof. These certificates can be designed to represent different contributions or recognition. What they stand for is included in the certificate. Through these objects we will critically explore notions of social capital and reputation, empathy and gift economies, and social behavior. We are also developing a blueprint/ model for other people to start doing the same. The code is open source so that others can experiment with the idea of digital certificates. Those certificates would have no connection to the Media Lab.