by Ryan Craig, Forbes
Credentials are a currency. And as far as it goes, higher education’s current degree-currency is an unwieldy one – not unlike the giant stone coins from the island of Yap. These coins – up to 13 feet in diameter – were laboriously mined and shipped from Palau, an island nearly 300 miles away. On Yap, they remained in one place, and unit ownership was transferred virtually; because the community was small and tight-knit, everyone knew the current ownership of every stone coin. Blockchain – or distributed ledger technology (DLT) – is a similar digital solution for a community that’s not so small or tight-knit. To achieve a Yap-topian virtual currency, DLT codes ownership of the currency unit into the currency itself in the form of a lengthy data file that is built, stored and verified in a distributed manner. So the analogy for credentials is clear. Credly, the leading provider of digital credentials, has demonstrated the power of unbundling credentials down to the level of the competency and thousands of employers, associations, training providers, colleges, and universities are already issuing digital credentials via Credly. (My firm, University Ventures, is an investor in Credly.)
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