About
Credentials, minus the trust tax.
LearnCoin is infrastructure for verifiable credentials. We sign, batch, and anchor — issuers own their brand, recipients own their records, and verifiers trust the cryptography, not us. We're based in Tallinn, Estonia, and we're building the credential layer the open web should always have had.
Why this, why now
A decade of EdTech, one repeating pattern.
I've been building in EdTech since 2015. Ten years of watching the same pattern repeat: institutions that take curiosity seriously — universities that let students show what they actually did, employers that want real evidence of skill, platforms that care about what a learner produced and not just which module they finished — keep running into the same wall. Credentials. Accreditation. The trust layer between "this happened" and "someone believed it."
That layer has been slow, expensive, and stiff. A university spends years earning accreditation only to issue degrees on paper their graduates can't cryptographically share. Micro-credentials live in platform silos that die with the platform. A learner's proudest project — the capstone, the industry challenge, the mentor-reviewed output — ends up on a personal website the recruiter never checks. Every handoff between issuer and verifier loses information and adds friction. Institutional credentialing, meanwhile, has barely moved.
The economics have caught up with the idea. Public-chain anchoring on Ethereum L2s like Base is finally cheap enough that a credential costs cents to verify for decades. In parallel, the open standards the ecosystem needs — W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0, W3C Decentralized Identifiers, Open Badges 3.0 — are now standardised and shipping in real production systems. The cryptography, the tooling, the chain economics, and the institutional appetite for interoperable credentials have converged in the same window.
The regulatory landscape is moving in parallel. From December 2026, every EU Member State must offer citizens an EUDI Wallet; from 2027, regulated services including education must accept it. Universities will increasingly receive credentials through wallets rather than PDFs. LearnCoin is being built on the standards that ecosystem speaks — so credentials issued today remain presentable in the infrastructure your graduates will use tomorrow.
What was still missing: a managed service that makes those standards usable without the operational tax. Running a credentialing pipeline, managing signing keys, and maintaining verification infrastructure indefinitely is a full-time engineering commitment most issuers shouldn't have to take on.
That's what LearnCoin is. Your students' achievements, cryptographically verifiable. Your institution's brand, in front of the recipient. LearnCoin, invisible infrastructure underneath — so curiosity and achievement can travel with a learner across platforms, across institutions, across decades, and still prove themselves.
Open Badges 3.0, on a public chain, managed so institutions don't have to run the infrastructure themselves. That's the window, and that's why now.
Three commitments we refuse to soften
Open standards, not proprietary moats
Every LearnCoin credential is readable by any Blockcerts tool, any OB 3.0 importer, any W3C VC verifier. If we disappear, credentials still work. That's the design, not an accident.
Verification is free, forever
We will never charge for verification, throttle it, or put it behind a login. Per-verify billing is a trust violation and we've written that into the terms.
Issuer brand, not ours
A credential issued by a university shows the university's identity, not ours. LearnCoin is invisible infrastructure. Your students, your relationship.
Where we stand
First issuer live, second onboarding, infrastructure shipping.
Live today: end-to-end credential issuance and verification pipeline on dev.learncoin.me, signed credentials on Base Sepolia, public verification pages with client-side signature verification, GDPR-aware schema split with tenant-scoped Row Level Security.
First tenant: Ewance, a Tallinn-based platform running real-world industry challenges for higher-education students. Ewance issues verifiable credentials to students via LearnCoin for each completed challenge.
Onboarding: Challenge University (challenge.university) — targeted for Q4 2026.
On the roadmap: Base mainnet cutover, formal 1EdTech Open Badges 3.0 conformance, OpenID4VCI / OpenID4VP, and EUDI Wallet alignment.
If you build credential-issuing software, talk to us.
We're looking for the next Ewance — a platform whose credentials deserve to outlive the platform itself. If that's you, we'll help you integrate in days.