A school diploma is the first formal record a young person owns, and it has to be trusted for decades. Today it is paper or a PDF, which proves nothing by itself. When an employer or a university needs to confirm it, someone telephones or emails the school, a member of the school office searches an archive, and the student waits, sometimes for weeks. The cost falls on the school and the delay falls on the student. Meanwhile forged certificates circulate freely, because checking is slow enough that most people never bother.
We built this so that a school can issue a record once and never be asked about it again. Everything else follows from one decision: the party that issues pays, and checking is free for everyone else. The moment a check carries a fee, it stops happening, and a document nobody checks is worth nothing.
The school keeps issuing records as it does now. Our issuing console connects to the school's existing student record system, or takes a simple upload of a graduating class. At graduation each student receives a digital credential alongside the paper copy, held on their phone or in a wallet of their choice.
For whoever receives it, there is nothing to install. They scan the credential and see who issued it, what it says, and whether it is still valid. The check runs against a published list rather than by contacting the school, so it works without a connection, the school office is never the bottleneck, and the school never learns which employer looked at a former student's record.
Two things matter in a school setting. A record that is withdrawn or corrected stops working the same day instead of circulating for years. And a young person can prove one fact, such as completing a course, without exposing the rest of their record.
The first school deployment was a public combined elementary and junior high school in East Asia, which has issued its graduation certificates this way for several years. Successive cohorts now leave school already holding a record that will still verify when they apply for work or further study.
Since then the platform has grown well beyond one school. More than 6,000,000 credentials have been issued across 15 countries and regions, for 45 governments, 18 healthcare institutions and over 50 universities, along with a number of K12 institutions issuing graduation, course completion and co-curricular records. In Europe, The Hague Academy for Local Governance in the Netherlands and UWE Bristol in the United Kingdom issue through the platform, and we work with the World Health Organization on credentials for health workers and volunteers.
It has spread mainly through issuers telling other issuers, because the benefit shows up quickly: the school office stops handling verification requests.
Two changes came from schools rather than from us. The first was selective disclosure, after schools pointed out that a student applying for a part time job should not have to hand over an entire academic record to prove one course. That is in production today.
The second was offline verification. Early versions checked by contacting the issuer, which was fine in an office and useless at a careers fair or in a district with no reliable connection, so verification now runs against a published list that a verifier can hold locally.
We are candid about what is not done. Zero knowledge proofs are on the roadmap rather than in production, and the service is cloud hosted today with no self hosted option, which some ministries will eventually want.
Write to Jeff Hu at jeff.hu@turingspace.co and we will set up a short call to look at how your school issues records today.
A first deployment is usually one graduating class. We take the class list, configure the credential to match the certificate the school already awards, and issue it alongside the paper copies, so nothing about the ceremony or the school's own process changes. That normally takes a few weeks of light work from one person in the school office, and we do the rest.
There is nothing to pay for the students, the employers or the universities who later check a record, and the credential format is an open standard, so a school that changes supplier later keeps credentials that still work.
