The problem certify-eth solves

The need for certifications and official documents is required by most industries. Professional certifications can help individuals advance faster in their careers, especially in highly-specialised industries such as human resources, accounting, or information technology.

While not all certifications are created equal, they do assure professional competence in tandem with a professional degree or work experience. Fake certificates and documents can be easily produced which are hard to distinguish from the original document.

Thus it is very important to have safeguards in place to catch and prevent fraud in the earliest stage possible. Certification forgery is a very prevalent industry across the globe. Entire scams have developed around the fake degree racket with individuals, for a small price, being able to buy certificates for courses they never actually took.

To tackle this problem, the implementations available in the market today work by using image processing to detect any tampering. The problem with methods like these is that they cannot detect for sure whether it's forged or not. It's probabilistic in nature.

The project consists in designing and implementing the system which aims to tackle this problem by creating a secure blockchain-based solution that guarantees the authenticity of certification. The solution proposed is to allow the issuer of the certificate to create verifiable certificates on the blockchain. The project leverages non-fungible token technology to represent certificates on the blockchain.

The token representation of certificates can verify the original creator of the token.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we faced was implementing the multi-sig wallet. We had planned to use gnosis safe for it and invested
a lot of time into it. But it was in vain as we felt that even though the product is awesome, the developer documentation does not live upto it's technology. This was a major setback for as as we had a major part of our system architecture reliant on gnosis.
We also had an alternative idea of creating provable screenshots using zk-proofs but it felt too daunting to take up.
The idea came up while attending one of the talks organized by Mina, about how to use oracles for connecting web2 and web3. Unfortunatley it being a very new technology, we couldn't get an idea on how to proceed furthur.

Even though we faced problems like this, it was ultimatley our teamwork and sleepless hours that contributed to successfully completing the project. We took shifts on who gets to sleep, divided work based on everyone's comfort and had always remembered to have fun while doing so. It is euphoric feeling, to be able to be part of such a big event.