Three important universities of Greece belonging to the National Network of Research and Education of Greece (GRNET), are developing a project that will support university degrees with blockchain technology
The technological and financial services company IOHK, created by one of the founders of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson, will be responsible for carrying out this project hand in hand with the Athens Business and Economics University, the Democritus University of Thrace and the Aristotle University of Salonica, one of the most important in the country. The application will be open source and the tool that the company will use to create the registration application will be Mantis, a beta client of Ethereum Classic, which was launched in August of 2017.
Currently, the validation of university degrees in the country is done in a traditional way, with the support on paper that is verified by employers and interested institutions. This project will not only save a large amount of paper, but will also facilitate the streamlining of the registration and verification processes and will also help to make the information available for consultation from anywhere in the world.
In this regard, Panayiotis Tsanakas, General Director of GRNET, considers that the registration of the titles in the blockchain will be a significant advance for the nation and that it will promote transparency in the management of degree titles and will significantly boost the country's productivity. . Tsanakas also considers working with IOHK as an opportunity to update GRNET's knowledge about blockchain:
We see Blockchain as an important enabler for a new generation of distributed applications, while also being aware of the challenges faced by existing technologies. Therefore, we were eager to collaborate with IOHK to take advantage of the latest innovations in the area.
Panayiotis Tsanakas
Director General, National Research and Education Network of Greece
The launch of the prototype of the system is scheduled to begin this year and will be open source, allowing its availability on GitHub. In addition, they point out that the blockchain to be used will be provided by Cardano and its Ouroboros platform, which implements the Participation Test protocol designed by IOHK. Cardano was developed by IOHK, and was only launched during the month of last September, but it is already among the first ten cryptocurrencies in market capitalization.
This is not the first case in which a university in the world plans to register its titles in the blockchain. A French university was the first in the country to do so in early 2016. More recently, in October, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted a pilot test to register the certificates of 111 of its students in the blockchain, who could access from the comfort of an application designed for smartphones.
Likewise, IOHK has also partnered with universities on other occasions, since in February of last year it was in charge of announcing the financing of blockchain laboratories at universities in Tokyo and Scotland.