Why Quorum, as blockchain platform in SmartDegrees?

Blockchain technology is expected to be disruptive in any activity based on the registration of property titles with time stamps. In particular, it will be the most important technology to change higher education. Big data, social networks, MOOCs, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are components of something new, enabled and transformed precisely by blockchain.

The advantages of blockchain are:

• Autonomy: users identify themselves and maintain control of the storage and management of their personal data, as their sovereign owners.
• Trust: in its operations, such as to carry out transactions such as payments or issuance of certificates.
• Transparency and provenance: transactions are made with the knowledge that each party has the capacity to participate in them.
• Immutability: records are recorded and stored permanently, without the possibility of modification.
• Disintermediation: eliminates the need for a central control authority to manage transactions or keep records.
• Collaboration: the parties can make transactions directly between them, without intermediating third parties.

SmartDegrees is a platform for the registration and certification of academic degrees, on which it builds services that value academic degrees for the labor market and society. The platform is based on blockchain, due to the advantages offered by this technology, referred to above, mainly the following:

• It is distributed, with replicated nodes that prevent it from falling or losing information.
• It is 100% safe, without risk of being hacked.
• It has no possibility of third party interference. It keeps an immutable record of all the data that interacts in the network.

Additionally, among the various possible blockchain platforms, SmartDegrees takes the most mature and appropriate current platform for academic degrees: blockchain allowed network based on Quorum, the enterprise version of Ethereum, open source and free to use.

The reasons of Quorum for SmartDegrees are in the maturity of the technology and in its greater adequacy:

• Smart contracts network (allows to use all the logic of a complete Turing machine). Other platforms, such as Bitcoin, do not have smart contracts.
• Without cryptocurrency, for being unnecessary and complicating the operation of the network. The revenue model is out of network.
• Voting as a type of consensus (for the type of contract to be handled, for speed and not to demand a large process capacity in the nodes).
• Private network and operations between nodes. A dedicated network favors the definition and implementation of a specific type of processes, such as university accreditations.
• It allows greater scalability, both in terms of participants and activity, as well as in extending the scope of certifications beyond academic degrees, such as competencies, practices, minutes and other university processes.

In order to take advantage of blockchain opportunities and provide greater transparency to its activity for universities, SmartDegrees, in addition to registering in its blockchain network, also externally notarizes all its operations in the Alastria network and offers universities, optionally, the exploitation of network nodes by the universities that want to do so.