DECEMBER - 20208GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKFor the uninitiated, blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Apart from the widely known Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are many other types of DLT with different attributes and value propositions. The technology is promising and many, including our team at GovTech, have been working on DLT proof-of-concepts.OpenCerts on Public DLTOpenCerts is one of them. It uses DLT to not arise and verify academic and skills credentials. Leveraging blockchain technology and open standards, OpenCerts allows educational institutes (both local and overseas) to easily create digital, tamper-proof versions of every academic certificate that has been or will be issued. It is best suited for a low-trust environment with little or no central certifying authority.At the heart of the matter is trust--how can employers trust that potential candidates are as qualified as they claim to be? When it comes to issues of provenance involving multiple parties situated in different geographies, OpenCerts may be the answer.Once you issue certificates using OpenCerts, it's permanent and it's immutable. The certificates are essentially time stamped and assigned a cryptographic signature that becomes invalidated should any attempt be made to tamper with the certificates' contents. To achieve this, we created libraries and open standards to publish digital signature of the certificates on the public blockchain. Education institutes can publish their academic certificates on the Ethereum blockchain. Since it's on the public blockchain, institutions only need to pay for transaction fee because there's no infrastructure hosting required. The code which we developed is also open source--any institution, in any country, can use it without being locked-into proprietary standards or technology. OpenCerts change the way students receive their degree certificates and transcriptsDigital representation of the documents will be issued as a single JavaScript Object Notifier (JSON) file by the educational institutions, containing human-readable DISTRIBUTED LEDGER TECH FOR PUBLIC GOODSteven KohIN MYOPINIONSteven Koh, Director, Agile Consultancy & Engineering, Government Digital Services (GDS), GovTech SingaporeByF
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