Universities on the Blockchain?

From Static Degrees to Dynamic Credentials

What if your diploma could evolve like your knowledge does? What if your learning journey wasn’t stored in a university vault but lived with you, updated in real-time, verified across borders, and truly yours? After publishing a series of articles exploring the crisis and opportunity in higher education, several readers asked: how would blockchain actually work in this ecosystem? Their curiosity – and the deeper implications behind it – led me to explore this question further.

In a world where skills emerge in micro-moments and knowledge changes weekly, static degrees no longer suffice. The first article in this series, ‘The Death of Universities?’, asked whether the university model still holds. The second, ‘Too Many People Go to University?’, revisited who higher education really serves. The third, ‘Universities Kill the Planet?’, challenged universities to become agents of planetary regeneration.

This fourth piece extends that arc – reimagining the very architecture of trust, recognition, and learning in a decentralized future.

What if your learning record wasn’t locked away in a university’s archives, but lived with you – evolving, verifiable, and owned by you? What if every skill, contribution, and project could be captured and shared across the web of your life, your communities, your work?

This is not science fiction. It is already happening.

Key Characteristics of Blockchain Credentialing

The Infrastructure of Trust

At the heart of this transformation is the idea that credentials must be as fluid, dynamic, and decentralized as learning itself. Blockchain – the same technology behind cryptocurrencies and NFTs – is now being reimagined as the bedrock for lifelong learning. Not for speculation, but for trust.

Projects like Learning Economy Foundation and Open Badges offer blockchain-based frameworks where learners can earn, store, and share credentials across institutions and borders. In MIT’s Digital Credentials Initiative, diplomas are issued on blockchain networks, accessible anywhere, tamper-proof, and shareable in a click.

At Woolf University, courses built by educators worldwide are credentialed on-chain, removing bureaucratic friction while upholding academic rigor; and what about El Salvador? a country I recently began to explore, and that already investing in blockchain infrastructure. I see that there is a unique opportunity to leapfrog the bureaucracies of the past and become a testbed for educational innovation.

Imagine this:

A 17-year-old in Kenya completes a climate science simulation built with students from Brazil, India, and Finland. Each participant receives a verifiable credential on their personal blockchain wallet, instantly visible to NGOs, employers, and universities. That same student later leads a disaster preparedness hackathon, and her impact report – co-signed by UNICEF – is anchored to her lifelong learning chain.

She never “graduates” – because she never stops learning.

Remember the 3L’s? It’s all about nurturing curiosity as part of a lifelong learning experience.

The TING Global Educational Program, an initiative I lead, works with schools and universities worldwide to reimagine education as a collaborative act of planetary stewardship. Now, we are exploring a blockchain-based “TING Ledger” – a decentralized learning identity for students participating in Ting workshops and TINGmania challenges.

Students who co-create local solutions to global challenges – climate action, community health, AI ethics – receive not just feedback, but recognition anchored in transparent, portable, and permanent records. We envision this as a bridge between the traditional university transcript and the emerging world of learning DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

Beyond credentials, blockchain enables communities of purpose – where learners self-organize, govern, and reward contributions in real time. Imagine student-led DAOs focused on biodiversity, clean energy, or ethical AI, using tokenized governance to drive collaboration across borders.

Blockchain doesn’t just track credentials – it can empower creators. As students generate real-world impact through capstones, startups, and research, smart contracts can embed licensing rights directly into their work.

Universities could evolve Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) from gatekeepers of faculty IP to incubators of student innovation – helping students mint their ideas as NFTs, form co-ownership agreements, or distribute royalties in open ecosystems.

Education becomes a launchpad, not a silo. Every project is a potential asset, protected and powered by blockchain.

From Ideas to Assets: Real-World Value in Learning

What if a research project could become a tradable asset? What if students could co-own the impact they create, and investors could fund learning by backing real-world outcomes?

Enter Real-World Assets (RWAs) – a new frontier where intellectual property, community innovation, and environmental impact can be tokenized and shared on-chain. While RWAs have made headlines in finance – bringing tangible assets like real estate and carbon credits to blockchain – they may be equally transformative in education.

Imagine students creating climate tech prototypes or publishing research on food security. These contributions could be minted as NFTs, governed by smart contracts, and embedded with co-ownership and licensing rights. Tuition could be offset by staking the future value of ideas. Donors could fund not just scholarships but specific regenerative projects – receiving fractional ownership in the solutions they help seed.

RWAs also offer a path for universities to tokenize parts of their infrastructure – solar farms, smart dorms, innovation labs – inviting alumni or the public to co-own and co-fund learning ecosystems. Even service projects, like local reforestation or community health campaigns, could generate impact-backed tokens that contribute to both a student’s learning profile and a global commons.

As education becomes more entangled with the real-world challenges it seeks to solve, RWAs offer a way to measure, recognize, and sustain that connection. They help us move from knowledge about the world to knowledge in service of the world.

“Education will become not just a system of knowledge transmission, but a web of identity expression,” says Alex Grech, digital transformation expert and member of the Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning. “Credentials will follow the learner, not the institution.”

This shift opens powerful, urgent questions:

Who owns the data of learning?

Who defines what counts as knowledge?

Can credentials reflect community, collaboration, and context – not just content?

As Audrey Watters reminds us, “Edtech is never neutral.” Our choices shape the values baked into the systems we build.

If AI represents the exponential power of cognition, blockchain represents the integrity of contribution. Together, they offer the architecture for a learning commons – a world where curiosity is credentialed, not controlled.

But this only works if learners hold the keys.

Governments could issue learning wallets at birth – secure, personal repositories where every course, workshop, project, and contribution is verifiably stored. This would shift credentials from static records to living profiles. It would also democratize learning – recognizing skills gained in community work, freelance projects, open-source contributions, and beyond. Immersive technologies such as AR and VR could enrich this ecosystem, enabling real-time, multi-sensory learning experiences – recorded, verified, and shared across global networks. AI tools would then help analyze learning patterns, suggest opportunities, and optimize collective problem-solving.

Glossary of Emerging Terms:

Verifiable Credential – A digital certificate that is cryptographically secure and independently verifiable.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) – A model where individuals fully control their digital identity and credentials.

Learning DAO – A decentralized autonomous organization dedicated to collaborative learning and governance of education.

Credential Wallet – A blockchain-based application where learners store and manage their learning records.

Digital Transcript – A lifelong, evolving record of formal and informal learning.

Build the Future Together

I invite academic leaders, policymakers, and technologists to co-create this future.

If you’re a university – pilot a blockchain credentialing layers.

If you’re a government – explore how learning wallets and decentralized TTOs can increase transparency, mobility, and innovation.

If you’re a student – demand recognition not just for what you study, but what you do – and what you create.

Let us build an ecosystem where every act of learning, every spark of insight, and every act of service or invention leaves a meaningful, verifiable trace. Where trust is not given by gatekeepers, but earned – and owned – by learners.

The future of education isn’t just decentralized.

It is distributed, verifiable, and alive.