Paving the way to the digitization of diplomas in Romania
How “EBSI4RO: Connecting Romania through Blockchain” and walt.id will enable universities and other educators to adopt digital diplomas and micro-credentials in Romania, based on Europe’s emerging digital identity standards.
About EBSI4RO
The central scope of the CEF Telecom Action “EBSI4RO: Connecting Romania through Blockchain” is to create an extendable and sustainable ecosystem to facilitate and accelerate the awareness, knowledge, and adoption of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) by the Romanian citizens, businesses, institutions, and administration. It will also support the participation and contribution of Romanian stakeholders to the EBSI, particularly regarding the Diplomas use case.
EBSI4RO is implemented by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) and Politehnica University of Timisoara (UPT), two renowned Romanian research institutions.
The Challenge.
One of the main goals of the project is to implement a national system for verifiable diplomas - integrated with the National Student Enrolment Registry - and for micro-credentials. The approach has to be paperless, decentralized, verifiable and aligned with the emerging European Blockchain Services Infrastructure/European Digital Identity Ecosystem: EBSI/ESSIF.
The team has decided to use “Self-Sovereign Identity” or “SSI” because it was the easiest solution to adopt, it empowers the project with Blockchain and EBSI, and SSI is becoming the new standard for digital identity.
Given the technical challenges and the project resources, the project team considered it beneficial to collaborate with walt.id and use their open source products.
The Solution.
The project team screened the market for solutions that would allow them to adopt SSI fast and without much complexity. Specifically, they looked for a solution that is
open source under a permissive license (e.g. Apache 2),
compliant with the new EU identity standards (EBSI/ESSIF),
easy to use and integrate,
easy to contribute due to mainstream programming language used
complemented by expert support.
Walt.id was the only fit for them. As a result, the project team has decided to use walt.id’s SSI products to introduce digital diplomas and micro-credentials for educators and students.
The Results.
The evaluation of walt.id’s SSI products and the first proof of concept have been done and everything was very easily understood. Taking part in the EBSI Early Adopters Programme, together with the University of Athens, Greece and the University of Lille and BCdiploma, France, the EBSI4RO team is currently finalizing the first demo for issuing diplomas on EBSI in cross-border scenarios.
Till the end of March 2023, the plan is to implement verifiable credentials for the national academic system and to issue micro-credentials for the completion of different programs, such as 50.000 micro-credentials for the teachers who participated in the national project “CRED - Relevant Curriculum and Open Education to all”.
Also, EBSI4RO has quickly built up extensive knowledge about SSI (and ESSIF), supported by walt.id's customer success team, even in a few online meetings. It is worth mentioning that a member of EBSI4RO has made a contribution to walt.id’s open source libraries.
"Walt.id’s open source products were very easy to use and implement and they helped us enormously to kick-start our project and opened new directions to contribute and scale out.
The team was very professional, experienced and always ready to support."
Cosmin Cioranu
EBSI4RO Coordinator,
UEFISCDI
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About the organizations.
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Walt.id develops Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) solutions for businesses and governments across industries.
Developers and organisations rely on our open source products as an easy and fast way to use Self-Sovereign Identity - including Europe’s new digital identity ecosystem based on the EU Blockchain and the EU SSI Framework (ESSIF).
To ensure client’s success, our industry-leading experts provide holistic services including from conception over the implementation of pilots and production system to enterprise support and managed cloud services.
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The central scope of the CEF Telecom Action “EBSI4RO: Connecting Romania through Blockchain” is to create an extendable and sustainable ecosystem to facilitate and accelerate the awareness, knowledge, and adoption of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) by the Romanian citizens, businesses, institutions, and administration. It will also support the participation and contribution of Romanian stakeholders to the EBSI, particularly regarding the Diplomas use case.
EBSI4RO is implemented by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) and Politehnica University of Timisoara (UPT), two renowned Romanian research institutions.