Blockchain Innovation Challenge

About the Challenge

The challenge sought technology-enabled solutions that reoriented the education and employment ecosystem around the individuals that they aim to serve. It invited teams to articulate a vision and design pilots that addressed an ecosystem-first designed approach driving interoperability, social mobility, and learner control expanding on these essential themes:

  • Empower all learners: How can learners exercise agency over their digital identities, including all records of learning, so they can share them in a secure, validated, and machine-readable way?
  • Unlock lifelong learning: How can learning be better documented, validated, and shared no matter where it occurs? How can control or ownership of learning records improve the way underserved learners connect and unlock disparate learning opportunities?
  • Improve economic mobility: How can blockchain help learners to find in-demand education in employment-relevant skills to advance economic mobility and to fulfill the promise of higher education?​​
Blockchain Innovation Challenge Winners

The Education Blockchain Initiative ​​​Steering Committee selected projects based on their potential to scale across institutions, state​​s, industries, learner populations, learner socioeconomic status, and learner timelines. The rigorous selection process, including a prescreen and a technical review in addition to the main evaluation, ensured that biases and conflicts of interest were negated.

The four winners of the Blockchain Innovation Challenge were:

Evaluation Criteria

​​​Applications were evaluated on the following criteria (please see the Application Guidelines document (PDF) for detailed definitions):

  • Quality of the ecosystem-first design approach​
  • Quality of the technological approach
  • ​Quality of the management plan and adequacy of resources
About the Applicants