From digital badges to verifiable credentials

Traditionally, digital badges, also known as “Open badges” in English, emerged more than 10 years ago in the United States as a Mozilla initiative. These digital credentials allow a person or institution to recognize the skills, knowledge or abilities that a student or professional possesses.

The technology standard used to award more than 70 million digital badges in 2022 alone is called Open Badge 2.1. Recently, the third version of the standard was released, known as Open Badge 3.0, which aligns with the W3C verifiable credentials data model.

What does this mean and why is it important?

1.Goodbye to email addresses as a mandatory requirement for sending badges.

Until now, the use of email addresses as identifiers of individuals to award digital badges has been common. However, this raises privacy, security, and long-term maintenance issues, as email addresses can change or become inactive over time.

Verifiable credentials use decentralized identifiers (DIDs) that provide a unique, persistent and secure way to prove a person’s identity. This can be implemented through wallets in web browsers or mobile phone applications, although it is not strictly necessary. In fact, DIDs can be generated from a phone number or an email address.

Using DIDs ensures greater privacy and security, as well as lasting recognition of achievements, regardless of changes to the recipient’s email address. Although it may cause some confusion initially, badge platforms are expected to make it much easier to use.

2.Recognition without mandatory images

In the Open Badges 2.0 standard, the use of some form of image was required. In fact, metadata was included within the image as part of the “baking” process to ensure portability.

While images are great for graphically representing an achievement, they can sometimes be a barrier to recognition, as some organizations prefer to use other visual methods more aligned with their brand image or style.

With Open Badges 3.0 and compliance with the verifiable credentials model, there is no longer a mandatory requirement to include an image. Verifiable credentials focus primarily on data and use JSON-LD (a standard for linked data) to describe the content. This approach makes the badge/credential readable by both humans and machines.

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This means that they will be much more interoperable and can be read by recruiting platforms, for example.

3.Greater control, privacy and granularity

With Open Badges, the badge holder had to choose between two options: not share any details (metadata) about the badge or share everything. Verifiable Credentials allow for more precise control through “Verifiable Presentations.”

This means that credential holders can choose what information to share and with whom, giving them greater autonomy and flexibility.

For example:

• A person with an identification card in the form of a verifiable credential could maintain anonymity (not reveal name or gender), while proving that they are of legal age to purchase alcohol or the appropriate license to drive a car.
• In a learning context, someone could choose to create a Verifiable Presentation that includes various badges/credentials to apply for university or a job, without revealing age, gender, nationality or other personal data to avoid bias in hiring processes.

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