The use case includes a typical setup of the interactions and process flow associated with the life cycle of the educational credentials/qualifications of an individual. In this book, we will consider the aspects of the use case that involve the following scenarios:

• Issue/approval of certificates by a competent authority
• Availability of certificates to the owner (that is, the student)
• Verification of certificate by third parties such as employers or other educational institutions

In a real-life scenario, there are too many stakeholders involved in this scenario, such as specific school of studies, examination controller, the issuing institution, students, other institutions, and employers. For the sake of simplicity, we will consider the following stakeholders:

• Oracle Red School (ORS): Certificate creator (school of studies)
• Oracle Empire University (OEU): Certificate approver and issuer (university)
• Student, employer, other universities: Certificate viewer/verifier

Let's take a quick look at an existing real-life process in this use case:

The existing process has the following inefficiencies:

• The manual process of verification makes it slow
• The verification process is slow at ascertaining fraudulent claims
• It requires external background verification services
• Paper-based certificates are prone to loss or damage
• Faking paper certificates and gaps in the verification process makes certificates trustworthiness questionable