The traditional systems of verification of academic credentials are often cumbersome, prone to fraud and inefficient, often requiring the involvement of several organizations to verify the validity of one credential. The exploitation of related vulnerabilities has resulted in a lucrative market for fraudulent credentials, with estimates suggesting a yearly revenue of $7 billion. The proliferation of these credentials undermines not only Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) but also several other sectors of society, such as healthcare, thus posing a great risk to public safety.

This paper aims to tackle this issue by developing a blockchain-based framework, using the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) for the issuance and verification of academic certifications. The goal is to devise secure, transparent and efficient processes of academic certification issuance and verification, leveraging the blockchain's intrinsic qualities of security, immutability, transparency and decentralization. A thorough systematic literature review of related implementations has steered several architectural decisions, such as the adoption of standardized data models for credential creation, the automation of data handling, the use of digital wallets for credential storage, and the use of QR codes to facilitate the verification process.

The proposed framework establishes a hierarchical trust chain –spanning several governmental and educational institutions–, integrates trusted authentication mechanisms –Portugal's eID–, ensures regulatory compliance, allows the usage of user's digital wallets for credential storage and provides a simple mechanism of credential verification. This proposal expands on the reviewed literature by adopting the usage of the EBSI framework, which inherently complies with the data protection regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); adopts Self-Sovereign Identity principles, uses standardized data models, such as W3C Verifiable Credentials for credential representation, enhances interoperability; automates the data handling process to reduce human-made errors; and provides an easy and straightforward verification process to validate credentials, by providing credential QR-codes that allow to streamline its verification.

The article would cover the analyses of the current problem with fraudulent certifications, the systematic literature review, an in-depth analysis of the proposed architecture, detailing the establishment of the trust chain and the suggested workflows of the system, as well as a detailed analysis of the final developed platform.

Keywords: Technology, Blockchain, Digital Diplomas, EBSI.