A new  EU report, by Alexander Grech and Anthony F Camilleri, sets out eight scenarios for the blockchain in education administration.

Using: blockchains to permanently secure certificates, to verify multi-step accreditation, for automatic recognition and transfer of credits, as a lifelong learning passport, for tracking intellectual property and rewarding use and re-use, receiving payments from students, providing student funding in terms of vouchers, using verified sovereign identities for student identification within educational organisations

This is bad news indeed for institutions that rely on their ability to issue qualifications, rather than the quality of their teaching, for market share. As Grech and Camilleri put it; “blockchain(s) could probably disrupt the market in student information systems and loosen the control current players have.