Blockcerts v3 release, a Verifiable Credentials implementation

Hi CCG community,

I am excited to share with you today the release of Blockcerts<https://www.blockcerts.org/> V3. As you may already know the earlier versions of Blockcerts were architected by Kim H. Duffy through Learning Machine and leveraged the Open Badge standard.
We have followed through with the initial ideas established at RWOT 9<https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/final-documents/BlockcertsV3.md> in Prague in December 2019, to align Blockcerts with the Verifiable Credential specification.

Furthermore this initial version includes support for Issuer’s DIDs. In practice we leverage the Verification Method to cryptographically prove that the issuing address matches the public key of the issuer.
As in earlier versions, we offer a display layer to the credentials, which beyond the original HTML capabilities now support images and pdf documents. The signature suite still relies on the blockchain anchoring of the hash of the document and merkle root of the issuance, now with MerkleProof2019<https://w3c-ccg.github.io/lds-merkle-proof-2019/>.

In the future, we want to explore solutions to reinforce the trust layer with the DID ownership, improve the recipient experience in handling and sharing their certificates as well as allow for the recipient DID to be included in the process.

We would like to thank everyone in the community who directly and indirectly supported the release of this milestone in Blockcerts life, but as well we hope in the whole SSI ecosystem.

You may issue certificates through cert-issuer<https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer> and verify them with cert-verifier-js<https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js> (both in the browser or the server) or use the visual web component blockcerts-verifier<https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/blockcerts-verifier>.
As always, we do our best to tend to questions on the Blockcerts forum<https://community.blockcerts.org/> and welcome everyone in participating.

Best,

--

Julien Fraichot
Developer 4 – Hyland Trusted Documents

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