The cryptocurrency industry has long been criticized for its disconnect from the real world, but there are players trying to show that the underlying blockchain technology can solve some of the most pressing challenges we face in today’s society — especially in areas that lack basic infrastructure.
Iron, a Nairobi-based startup that is part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s 2023 Startup Battlefield 200, has developed a blockchain-based platform to release verifiable academic records. Speaking with TechCrunch in an interview, Akowe founder, Ayodeji Agboola, noted that there is a huge demand for digital certificate verification systems in sub-Saharan Africa partly due to the difficulty of re-issuing academic records and having them owned by universities.
“The university takes pride in the fact that a student passes through its school and issues a certificate to that member. They usually issue the certificate only once. If it’s lost, they often don’t want to reissue it; What they will give you is an affidavit. “The unique nature of universities makes them very protective of degrees,” Agboola said.
In 2018, the founder, who ran a digital marketing company, began training a group of small business owners on using Facebook. By 2019, the program had trained 30,000 people and needed proof that people had completed the course.
“We couldn’t find a very simple tool to use, so I just decided, ‘You know what?’ He said, ‘Let’s build this thing.'” So this was late 2020. We built it in three weeks. We showed it. We have tested it for our own certifications. It worked well. I said: Yes, we are at work.
“In Nigeria, in Africa, [blockchain] “It should be a tool that people can see, use and actually solve their problems,” Agboola added.
The part where blockchain plays a major role is storage. To get started, institutions upload their certificate forms and a list of recipients, which Akowe automatically creates digital copies of each individual’s academic records. Suppose a recruiter or visa officer needs to verify someone’s university degree, they can then check all the metadata – including the URL of the degree hosting site (usually the school’s website), university names, student names, courses, and grades , and graduation year – on the blockchain used by Akowe.
Akowe has used Hyperledger, a permissioned blockchain, in the past but is now tinkering with a new ledger database solution released by Amazon, QLDB, that allows organizations Create centrally managed records.
“An immutable ledger gives it the security, the tamper-resistant nature, everything you really need to be able to then be completely sure that anyone who wants to verify the credentials is verified,” the founder explained.
Akowe, which means “clerk” in Yoruba, is still run by Agboola as a one-man shop to this day with help from contract developers. It offers its platform to universities for free but takes a discount on the fees universities charge users. It is in the final stages of preparing pilots with two organizations and is in talks with 15 others, according to the founder.
The challenge for a startup is not the technology part, but user acquisition. “In private universities, there is a much greater understanding of the business process. It is profit-oriented and all that. . . . But public universities are where the bulk of people go. These are the most prestigious universities in Nigeria. . . . There are a lot of The red tape you need to get through,” he said, adding that he was careful in crafting his business pitches due to the negative image of blockchain technology.
“In the beginning, we were always very open to saying, ‘Hey, blockchain, blockchain.’ But then we found that [the universities] They had a negative connotation or understanding of the concept because they saw what happened with cryptocurrencies, and as long as they were concerned, they were all the same. So we stopped putting blockchain technology at the forefront of the conversation.”
“But when the conversation arises around safety, data, security, data and privacy, we say, ‘This is what we do. And it’s very different from cryptocurrencies and all that. And then it’s a lot better to have that conversation.’