In an increasingly networked world of education and work, students, researchers and professionals naturally move across national and institutional boundaries. Nevertheless, the verification of diplomas, certificates and further education credentials remains a slow, paper-based process in many places – costly, error-prone and susceptible to forgery. The global market for fake educational qualifications is now estimated at around two billion euros.
This is where the TrustXchange research project comes in, which is being developed as part of the BIG – Blockchain-based Innovation Governance programme at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Business. Together with the Zug-based HSLU spin-off SAPIO, which emerged from a student innovation project (funded by Smartup), the team is investigating how a sustainable and interoperable solution for digital educational credentials can be designed in Switzerland.
A preliminary study supported by Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, investigated how blockchain technology can be used as a trust infrastructure for digital educational credentials in the dynamically growing HR tech ecosystem – forgery-proof, cross-border and consistently user-centred. The goal: to lay the foundation for a sustainable education and labour economy in which qualifications are digitally verifiable, trustworthy and seamlessly applicable – across institutions, industries and national borders.
The aim is to create an interoperable, legally compliant and user-friendly ecosystem that offers equal benefits to learners, graduates and skilled workers, education and training providers, and companies.
The innovation of the project lies in a hybrid trust model that combines legally secure electronic signatures (public key infrastructure, PKI) with a decentralised verification mechanism based on blockchain technology ( ). This creates a bridge between traditional PKI infrastructures and modern, self-sovereign identity ecosystems (SSI). The aim is to make the European introduction of digital identity wallets (eIDAS 2.0) interoperable with the Swiss e-ID. The research team at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and SAPIO is using this window of opportunity to ensure that educational qualifications will be recognised, verifiable and forgery-proof throughout Europe in the future, regardless of the country in which they were issued.
In addition to technical development, the project team is also researching organisational and economic issues: How can learning credential holders and issuing bodies (e.g. universities, companies) be integrated into such a system? Which business models make digital verification services viable for SMEs? And how can we ensure that users can manage their data in a self-determined and comprehensible manner?
At its core is the vision of a trustworthy digital education economy in which blockchain is not just a technology, but an enabler of transparency, mobility and lifelong learning. This project opens up new perspectives for the interaction between universities, employers and knowledge workers: a digital ecosystem in which qualifications are forgery-proof, verifiable and immediately usable – anywhere in Europe and beyond.
In October 2025, SAPIO won the HR Tech Pitch Competition in Berlin, organised by allygatr, with prize money of €100,000. Congratulations!
