Docschain: Blockchain-Based IoT Solution for Verification of Degree Documents

Degree verification is the process of verifying the academic credentials of successfully graduated students. It is a time-consuming and costly process as universities annually spend millions of dollars on handling the degree verification requests. Hence, there is a dire need to improve the degree verification process, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, has introduced the blockcerts, a blockchain-based solution for freely handling the degree verification requests. Although blockcerts eliminates the cost of the degree verification process, it also alters the existing workflow of degree issuance. This is because blockcerts are primarily focused on facilitating the students, and there is room for improvement from the perspective of educational institutes. In this article, we have introduced the docschain to tackle the three mentioned limitations of the blockcerts. Docschain seamlessly incorporates within the existing workflow of degree issuance by operating over the hard copies of the degree documents. This is achieved through optical character recognition (OCR), and the record of each degree document is stored along with the details of the corresponding OCR template to understand the semantics of the data stored at different sections of the degree document. In contrast to blockcerts, docschain also supports the bulk submission of degree details for both the previously and newly graduated students.