Blockchain Technology applied to Education

Abstract

The purpose of the present work is offer an implementation of a private blockchain infrastructure for data storage, specifically the certificates of completion or participation issued by the Federal University of Tocantins, Campus Palmas-TO, Brazil, aiming to avoid their falsification by means of validation using hashing. Some institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Holberton School in San Francisco, use Bitcoin's public blockchain to maintain and validate their certificates, but paying fees for each operation. The blockchain implementation adopted for this project is Multichain, a solution that, because it is open source, reduces deployment costs, facilitates its installation and maintenance of its infrastructure, and doesn’t request the payment of any fees for information storage. Because of its security features and transparency in data storage, Blockchain has been used in a number of technologies, such as the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, smart contracts, shared economy, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, Internet of Things (IoT), management of identity, among others, and also in education, focus of this work.