Enhancing Micro-Credentials with Blockchain

Abstrakt

Micro-credentials are becoming central to educational digitalization, but their value depends on certificate trustworthiness. Centralized storage — the current standard — introduces scalability bottlenecks, outage risks, and a single point of compromise.

This paper examines these limitations and proposes blockchain as the underlying storage and verification layer. The decentralized model removes the authority problem: no single server holds the ground truth, and certificates are verifiable by any party without contacting the issuer.

The authors evaluate the proposed architecture against the requirements of a real university micro-credentials programme and conclude that blockchain can provide a robust framework for digitizing educational certificates. The work also identifies open questions around extending the model to corporate credentials and interoperability between institutions.