The problem dVault solves

A major issue faced by the education sector is document verification and authenticity which has been corrupted by malpractices like fraud and misrepresentation of records. Hence it is necessary to develop a system that can store, secure and verify these digital certificates in real-time. Blockchain technology enables keeping of public records (from the viewer side) of educational accomplishments that can be easily verified and accessible (from the issuer side) to many educational institutions in a decentralized manner.

dVault is a decentralized system to issue and validate digital academic certificates . It allows educational institutions to issue credible digital certificates to students (eliminates paper-based certificates). The certificate records are stored on the blockchain. Only the addresses of the recipient and the issuer of the certificate are recorded, thereby it also preserves the privacy of the parties involved. Also provides facility to verify the authenticity of a certificate using its unique ID. Institutions can also revoke the certificates they have issued, in case of any demanding circumstances. It is built using the Celo Blockchain. The smart contract of the decentralised application has been deployed on the Celo Alfajores Test Network. The Celo Extension Wallet is used to sign and send transactions.

Thereby dVault provides a completely transparent and reliable system to generate authentic certificates and also verify their validity, along with sufficient anonymity.

Challenges we ran into

A significant hurdle that we had faced was in developing the front end of the DApp since both of us were not specialised front end developers. But we were able to develop a UI to demonstrate all the significant features of the dVault application, by making use of react-bootstrap and material-ui. While facing issues with deploying the smart contract, the Celo documentation was helpful in overcoming them.