About the Client
Our client was an Africa – based entrepreneur who wanted to bring more transparency in education sector and build promising solutions.
The Core Problem
Forgery of documents was a major problem in the education sector. Apart from forgery, background verification companies reached out to universities as they being the solo point of contact was delaying the processes by weeks or months. Our client discovered this problem that was causing a disturbance in these industries.
In the education industry, there has been no standard practice to issue, store and securely share a certificate. The client wanted to solve this problem by creating a system similar to Blockcerts, where it becomes easy for universities to manage the certificates – from creation to storage and distribution.
Jalan Technologies’ Partnership
Jalan Technologies was a part of their project since the ideation stage. We developed the platform in 8 months and worked until the MVP launch and helped them improve the platform with more features.
Explaining The Product
We designed an Ethereum Blockchain-based platform for issuing and storing the certificates. It offers a solution to the education sector with the promises to provide cryptographically signed tamper-proof credentials that facilitate individuals the capacity to possess and share their official records.
Blockchain is a new technology and many people find it difficult to work with. To solve this problem, we developed a blockchain-based application for issuing blockchain certificates without using specific recipients and issuer inputs.
In our system, we developed a centralized wallet system that completes all the blockchain processes on the behalf of the recipient and issuer and issues a cryptographically signed tamper-proof certificate. The recipient can share his blockchain certificate with anyone and the platform also provide an option to share it on any other social media network.
The application runs all the complex processes by itself which provides an insight that it is possible to develop an enterprise blockchain solution without bringing end-users into the loop. We also designed a workflow where universities can design their certificates and present their certificates the way they want to.
How does it work?
A blockchain certificate is a digital document that is issued by an institute based on an Ethereum transaction between the issuing institute and the recipient that includes the hash of the certificate itself.
For example, Adam (Recipient) will put a request for his digital certificate to Jalan Technology Consulting (Issuer) and the platform will create an Ethereum transaction between Adam and Jalan Technology Consulting and issue a certificate that contains the transaction ID for future verifications.
Key Challenges While Working On Blockchain And Their Solutions
Making it Cost-effective
since every transaction on Blockchain costs something
Certificate payload was the major driving factor when it came down to cost which is going to incur while issuing certificates on blockchain. We spent some time to make sure that payload size remained as small as possible and making sure that we only include which is absolutely required.
For keeping the payload size smaller, we also spent some time in compressing and encoding techniques for including image assets such as university logos. We had several mechanisms in place to make sure we correctly estimate the gas price as well.
Making it Time Efficient
since issuing certificates on blockchain in a multi- step process
Issuing certificates on blockchain is not only time-consuming, it also comprises of multiple steps. We used message queue mechanisms for it. We chose RabbitMQ because of AMQP (the simplest of protocol out there for message processing).
Message queues allowed us to process certificates in parallel. This also allowed us to have our own custom retry logic in place in case something goes wrong during the process. It basically involved identifying at what point did the issue occurred, persisting all the necessary details the process had at that point, and reschedule the processing via queuing the message back to the queue. Our process was smart enough to resume exactly where it left off and resume the certificate issuing.
Dealing with Irreversible processes on Blockchain
Issuing anything on blockchain is an irreversible process, so we need to make sure that the certificate that we are issuing is valid and all the information embedded within it correct and up to date. We spent our time in making sure that pipeline we have for obtaining student / university information is error free and have mechanisms in place if something goes wrong.
For example – In cases where student / university information could not be obtained or needs to be updated, we would abort the process and communicate the same to responsible parties to take necessary actions. Process was simply queued back to the signing queue once we had the required information to continue.
Tech Stack
NodeJS
Node. js is primarily used for non-blocking, event-driven servers, due to its single-threaded nature. It’s used for traditional web sites and back-end API services.
Angular
Angular is a platform and framework for building single-page client applications using HTML and TypeScript. Angular is written in TypeScript.
MongoDB
MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents.
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ is open source message broker software (sometimes called message-oriented middleware) that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).
Heroku
Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build, run, and operate applications entirely in the cloud.
