Governance and Interoperability of Verifiable Educational Credentials: An Information Systems Architecture Based on Hyperledger Indy
Sofia Terzi1,2,*, Katerina Zourou3, Ioannis Stamelos1, Konstantinos Votis4
1 School of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Thessaloniki, Greece
2 IDIKA S.M.S.A., Department of European Programmes, Athens, Greece
3 Web2Learn, Thessaloniki, Greece
4 Information Technologies Institute (ITI), Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Thessaloniki, Greece
* Corresponding Author: Sofia Terzi. Email: 
Computers, Materials & Continua https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.084524
Received 24 April 2026; Accepted 22 June 2026; Published online 29 July 2026
Abstract
Higher Education (HE) institutions and Lifelong Learning (LLL) providers increasingly issue digital certificates, yet prevailing solutions often lack interoperable credential schemas, verifiable provenance, and privacy-preserving verification at scale. In parallel, European initiatives promote verifiable credentials and cross-border recognition, but there is limited evidence on how Hyperledger Indy components—Redundant Byzantine Fault Tolerance (RBFT) consensus, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Anonymous Credentials (AnonCreds), and revocation registries—can be integrated into existing learning platforms while satisfying software service-quality and governance requirements. This paper presents a permissioned, privacy-preserving blockchain architecture for secure issuance and verification of educational verifiable credentials (VCs) and evaluates schema interoperability between LLL providers and HE institutions against three European reference frameworks: the Diploma Supplement (DS), ECCOE, and MicroHE/CMF. The proposed design integrates a Hyperledger Indy network with a Moodle plugin and a middleware layer that captures learning events, issues VCs to a digital wallet, and supports schema comparison and hybridization. The study combines comparative schema analysis of major Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms with two stakeholder workshops (
n = 7 institutions) and a qualitative security and service-quality evaluation mapped to a threat model and core software-quality attributes (integrity, availability, confidentiality, interoperability). Results indicate that LLL and HE schemas share sufficient metadata to enable DS-aligned issuance with minimal adaptation, and stakeholders report readiness to adopt standards when mandated or widely disseminated. The architecture provides tamper-evident provenance, issuer authentication, selective disclosure, and revocation support while keeping personally identifiable information off-chain.
Keywords
Verifiable credentials; information systems architecture; blockchain governance; interoperability; decentralized identity; privacy-preserving information systems
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