Per-verification billing is a trust violation

Some credential platforms charge for verification. They sell a monthly subscription to employers who want to check whether a candidate's credential is real. Some of them throttle — a free tier that dies at 100 verifications a month, an enterprise tier that starts at four figures.

LearnCoin will never do this. It's in our contract.

Here's why.

What a credential is for

A credential is a trust-transmission mechanism. An institution signs a claim about a person — "this student completed this course" — so that a third party (a recruiter, an HR system, another institution) can act on that claim without doing the verification work themselves. The economic value of the credential is the asymmetry: one signing event produces a document that many future verifiers can use cheaply.

If verification is priced per-check, that asymmetry collapses. The verifier now has to decide whether this particular verification is worth the cost. Most of the time, they won't bother. The credential becomes a decoration — a signal that some entity (the issuer) was willing to vouch for the recipient, rather than something the recipient's employer or the graduate school they're applying to can actually confirm.

What per-verification billing means in practice

Sertifier, VerifyEd, and a handful of smaller OB 2.0 platforms meter verification. Recruiters and HR tools that integrate with them see banners like "Verification quota remaining: 3 this month." At scale, this forces a choice: upgrade to a paid tier to keep verifying, or stop verifying.

Credly's situation is more subtle. Verification is free for individual badge holders and employers, but high-volume programmatic verification requires enterprise agreements. A recruiter's ATS can't just hit a verification endpoint ten thousand times a day. The marginal verification isn't billed, but the marginal scale is.

Even the "free" platforms implicitly ration: rate-limited APIs, bot-detection systems that block aggressive verification, feature gates on who can see the verification-status field at all.

LearnCoin's contractual commitment

Verification of a LearnCoin credential is free, forever, for anyone. We wrote this into our terms. Specifically:

1. No per-verify charge. Not today, not ever. The public verification page at learncoin.me/c/<id> runs verification client-side in the viewer's browser — there's no server-side billable event.

2. No quota. We don't rate-limit per-viewer or per-credential. Verify a credential a thousand times if you want. Verify it from an AI agent crawling at bulk.

3. No account requirement. You don't need a LearnCoin login, API key, or email to verify a credential. Anyone with the URL can verify.

4. Standards-compliant verification chain. Credentials use MerkleProof2019 Linked Data Proofs anchored on Base L2. Any Blockcerts-compatible verifier — the blockcerts-verifier Web Component, cert-verifier-js, native Blockcerts wallets — can verify LearnCoin credentials without touching LearnCoin's infrastructure at all.

Why this is possible — the economics

The commitment is not charity. It reflects the actual cost structure. Verification is a compute operation that takes a few milliseconds, uses less than a kilobyte of bandwidth, and reads a public blockchain transaction that anyone can read for free. The marginal cost to LearnCoin of a verification is effectively zero.

The cost center in credential infrastructure is issuance — canonicalizing credentials, Merkle-batching them, signing them with HSM-held keys, writing anchor transactions on-chain, maintaining the DID document. That's what tenants pay for. Verification consumes free resources.

When a platform charges for verification, they're not covering costs. They're extracting rent from the asymmetry credentials are supposed to create. It's the same move a DNS registry would make by charging every visitor of every website for each DNS lookup. Technically feasible, structurally corrosive.

Why this matters for procurement

For tenants evaluating credential infrastructure, the "free verification" commitment is a procurement question, not a feature question. Ask every vendor on the shortlist:

- Do verifiers need an account to check a credential? - Is there a verification quota? - Is there a verification API rate limit that affects third-party tools? - Is programmatic verification priced separately from interactive verification?

A vendor that answers yes to any of these has built a business model that extracts value from verifiers. Over a five-year procurement window, that business-model choice will shape how much your credentials are actually trusted, used, and referenced.

The broader principle

Credentials are public goods. The trust they carry is valuable precisely because it's costless to verify. Anything that reintroduces cost on the verification side eats the value.

LearnCoin will stay on the right side of that equation. We charge issuers, never verifiers, never recipients. And we put it in writing.

For the broader format context see Open Badges 3.0 vs 2.0 — what changes for institutions. For the anchoring economics that make free verification sustainable see Why LearnCoin anchors on Base, not Bitcoin.