ATTESTIFY: A HYBRID BLOCKCHAIN-IPFS FRAMEWORK FOR TRUSTLESS ACADEMIC CREDENTIAL VERIFICATION USING SOULBOUND TOKENS

Abstract

An ongoing institutional weakness is the widespread use of fraudulent credentials. Verification workflows that require institutions to communicate synchronously, through proprietary portals and unverified confirmation channels exacerbate the issue by providing no cryptographic guarantees of document integrity.To this end, research into blockchain-based credentialing has increased in significant amounts, but specific shortcomings have been evident throughout the literature: most proposed solutions address only parts of the credential lifecycle, none of them rely on non-transferable credentials for tokenisation of the credential holder, and participation in W3C interoperability standards is still in its infancy, if it exists at all.