A decentralised system that allows educational institutions to issue micro-credentials signed by students and later verified by potential employers. The system is designed with the core principle of operating in a decentralised environment without the need for a central authority. The system can be accessed by institutions, students, and employers globally, without registration or reliance on third-party servers, leading to reduced costs and an uptime guarantee. The system makes use of the Polygon Blockchain.
The release makes use of the Polygon Blockchain (Mainnet). You don't need to install anything since the project is compiled into a portable application. Educational institutions need some MATIC tokens to award students. For this application, MATIC is only used for gas (transaction) fees which is determined by the supply and demand of the Polygon network. MATIC can be purchased from a cryptocurrency exchange such as coinbase.com.
System makes use of the following endpoints:
- Infura https://www.infura.io/
- Polygon Gas Station https://wiki.polygon.technology/docs/develop/tools/polygon-gas-station/
The project comes with two folders: app and contracts. The app folder contains all the python code for this application. The contracts folder has all the smart contracts in solidity.
To run this project you are required to install the following:
- Python 3.8.0 https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380/
- Hardhat https://hardhat.org/
- VS Code https://code.visualstudio.com/
The application comes with multiple packages which needs to be installed. Inside the terminal, open the app folder and create a virtual environment for our python application.
Create a virtual environment
python -m venv venv
Activate environment
venv\Scripts\activate.bat
Install packages
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
ENV File
Inside the root of the app folder we need to create a .env file. In our case, we are going to connect locally to Hardhat, so it is suggested to add the below variables. You can easily replace the web3 provider to your preference.
WEB3_HTTPProvider=HTTP://127.0.0.1:8545
POLYGON_GAS_STATION=https://gasstation-mainnet.matic.network/v2
Compiling contracts
For our case, we are going to compile the solidity contracts using Hardhat. To do this open the contracts folder inside the terminal and install the OpenZeppelin libraries as described here: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/upgrades-plugins/1.x/hardhat-upgrades
Then run the following command:
npx hardhat compile
To test the contracts you can simply run:
npx hardhat test
To run the application, open the contracts folder inside the terminal and run the following command:
npx hardhat node
Once the node is up and running, open the app folder in the terminal and run the following command:
python main.py
Your application should start and you should see the welcome screen.
