Deqree: Certificate Validation 🎓

Summary:
In India, cases of fake degrees and forged certificates have been rising rapidly in recent years. When that is coupled with increasing unemployment rates, it results in a significant number of candidates applying for every single job position available on the market.
This means for recruiters it becomes an uphill battle to verify the credibility of each applicant's credentials reliably.
We are thus proposing a solution to use the metadata feature of Cardano Blockchain to create a platform that helps Universities, Recruiters, and degree holders alike to authorize, validate and securely store their certificate records in an easily accessible manner.
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Detailed Problem Statement:
In India and many other developing countries, The process of checking these degree certificates generates a lot of documentation, and storing them digitally necessitates a central authority in charge of managing the records, which opens the door to tampering and data loss. Some academic institutions make it simple and quick to check the validity of their qualifications online, without even asking who needs the information. Others assign the responsibility to third parties (by design or regulation), while others market the service. Finally, there are times when there is no other option but to contact the academic secretary's office at the educational institution to validate the legitimacy of a credential or qualification. Academic degree fraud, on the other hand, is a reality that arises with the involvement of authorities and institutional employees.
India, as a populous country with a large youth population and a gateway to numerous educational opportunities, lacks a consistent, stable, reliable, and tamper-proof method of verifying credentials. This is a significant disadvantage since there are a large number of fraud cases, which slows down the growth of our education sector and job markets. The existing tools available are insufficiently safe to keep fraud to a bare minimum. They, sadly, have numerous flaws and, on top of that, are ineffective in terms of cost.
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What we're trying to achieve. (Project Description)
To develop a decentralized application on the top of Cardano's blockchain to combat this serious problem.

• Since blockchain technology is resistant to data manipulation, it makes the validation of academic qualifications tamper-proof.
• The date (Timestamp) from which a piece of data is recorded cannot be changed and is publicly verifiable which is very crucial to verify the date on which a particular degree is being issued to a student.
• There's no need for a central authority.
  The use of Metadata:
• Client (Universities) will upload the content metadata from the digital degree and our platform will encode the metadata and assign it a unique key for each student.
• The metadata will then be attached to the transaction as Cardano gives us the ability to add metadata to blockchain transactions and the encoded information will be stamped onto Cardano's blockchain.
• Each transaction will use our private native token which will help us with traceability and accountability.
• The stamped information will be easily verifiable with our deqree platform.
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  Some Guiding questions
• Why does the target audience care about the solution?
  Our solution makes the process of authorizing and validating certificates an easy-to-use and straightforward process.
• Does the solution need hardware components?
  The user can access our services via a smartphone or PC.
• How does this create value for Cardano?
  Our project has the potential to bring in thousands of new users to the Cardano Ecosystem as India's higher education market is estimated to be over 37 million students and currently facing this serious issue.
  Several other such questions have been addressed in the attached white paper.
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  Expenses:
• Website Domain and Hosting costs ($1500)
• Hardware Costs ($5000)
• Cloud server hosting costs($1500)
• Logistics costs($2500)
• Some ADA reserved for testing($500)
• A buffer for future unforeseen expenses($2000)
• A Monthly Stipend for the team members for 6 months($12000)
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  Timeline:
  October 2021- Testnet Deployment
  December 2021- Mainnet Launch
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  Future Plans:
  We will start from a small scale in India and once our capabilities expand we could start offering our services to Institutions outside the country.