Executive Overview.
Veridaq lets universities issue tamper proof credentials and lets employers verify them without the university exposing a single student record. Everything is backed by zero knowledge proofs on Base L2.
The Problem
In Nigeria and across Africa, verifying academic credentials costs employers millions every year. A bank hiring a fresh graduate waits weeks for transcript verification. Universities either build expensive API integrations that expose their entire student database, or they process manual requests one at a time. Once data leaves the university, they have no control over where it ends up.
The scale of the problem is staggering. The Nigerian university system graduates over 600,000 students annually across 170 universities. Each graduate applies to multiple employers. Each employer verifies each candidate manually. The National Universities Commission estimates that 30 percent of submitted credentials in Nigeria have some form of alteration. This costs the financial sector alone an estimated 500 million naira per year in verification overhead and fraud losses.
Blockchain solutions exist but they make things worse. Most put raw student names, grades, and GPAs on a public ledger. Even encrypted credentials are only as safe as the key management, and academic records need to stay verifiable for decades. GDPR Article 17 requires that individuals can request deletion of their data, but blockchain is immutable. This creates a fundamental conflict between privacy regulation and blockchain transparency. Veridaq resolves this by never putting personal data on-chain in the first place.
Competitor Comparison
| Platform | Privacy Model | On-Chain Data | Verification | Gas Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VERIDAQ | Zero knowledge proofs | Poseidon hash only (32 bytes) | Groth16 on-chain | Paymaster sponsors |
| Blockcerts (MIT) | Signed PDF on blockchain | Full certificate hash | Off-chain signature verification | User pays gas |
| Dock.io | Verifiable credentials (VCs) | DID + credential hash | Off-chain VC verification | Subscription |
| Learning Machine (Evernym) | Hyperledger Indy VCs | DID + schema + credential definition | Off-chain VC verification | Permissioned ledger |
| Traditional paper | Full data exposure | N/A | Manual, weeks | Per-request fees |
Veridaq is the only solution that combines zero knowledge proofs, on-chain verification, and a sponsorship gas model that removes the blockchain complexity from end users. Competitors either expose data on-chain (Blockcerts), require users to hold cryptocurrency (Dock), or rely on permissioned ledgers that recreate the centralization problem.
How Veridaq Works
The system has three phases that correspond to the three user roles.
Institution Uploads
The registrar uploads an Excel file of graduating students. The backend hashes each record through Poseidon with a random blinding factor. Only the hash goes to the blockchain. The original data stays on the backend server encrypted with AES 256 GCM.
Employer Requests
An employer submits a matriculation number and a claim. Did this graduate achieve a CGPA above 3.50? The backend retrieves the encrypted record, generates a Groth16 proof in about 0.7 seconds, and submits it to the on chain verifier.
Verification Result
The smart contract checks the proof against the stored commitment and returns VERIFIED or NOT VERIFIED. The employer gets a boolean answer. The transaction hash is the permanent audit record. No student data was ever revealed.
Revenue Model
Veridaq uses a revenue sharing model that aligns incentives across all participants. When an employer consumes a verification credit, the proceeds are split three ways.
Batch upload pricing is based on file size: $20 for 1,001-5,000 records, $30 for 5,001-10,000, $90 for 10,001-25,000, and $170 for 25,001-50,000. Verification credits are sold in packs starting at $15 for 10 credits up to $550 for 500 credits.
Privacy Guarantees
The system provides three guarantees by construction. First, no student name, grade, or matriculation number ever appears on the public blockchain. The commitment is a Poseidon hash with a random blinding factor. Given only the hash, an attacker learns nothing about the underlying data.
Second, the backend cannot fabricate a VERIFIED result. The Groth16 verifier on chain checks mathematical soundness of every proof. Without a valid witness the proof fails.
Third, institutions can revoke any credential by nullifier. The verifier checks the RevocationRegistry before accepting a proof. A revoked credential always returns NOT VERIFIED regardless of the proof.