In February 2023, a school in Barcelona asked a simple question.
Their students were graduating with certificates and portfolios representing years of real work. International Baccalaureate courses. Projects. Hard-won achievements.
And none of it was independently verifiable.
Anyone could copy the same document. No university could confirm it without calling. No employer could check without waiting days. The gap between "I earned this" and "I can prove I earned this" was wide open.
So St. Peter's School [1] partnered with a deep-tech company and ran a pilot. It worked. And at the start of the 2025-2026 academic year, they went school-wide.
That gap has a price tag.
Credential fraud is a $21 billion global industry [2]. Diploma mills alone generate $7 billion a year [3] - a figure that has grown sevenfold since 2004. One Pakistan-based operation sold 8 million fake diplomas across 190 countries and is still running.
The system that was supposed to catch them? A phone call. A three-day wait. Hope.
Most institutions still verify credentials the same way they did in 1995. AI makes forgeries better every month. The gap widens.
One school closed it.
St. Peter's is the only international school in Barcelona offering the full International Baccalaureate Continuum in English. Recognized by Forbes. Accredited by Cambridge. And talked about in the press worldwide.
The question they asked in 2023: what if students could prove the work they did, without anyone having to trust a piece of paper?
Now every report card, every certificate, every parental consent form is cryptographically signed, timestamped, and anchored to a public blockchain. Any university anywhere in the world verifies it in seconds. No phone call. No waiting. No personal data stored onchain.
These are real kids. Real grades. Years of work.
They deserved to know nobody could take that from them.
Dr. Teresa Ferrer, Curriculum Coordinator at St. Peter's:
"What surprised us was just how important certified, verifiable academic records are for students applying to the world's most reputable universities. This gives our graduates a real advantage. It also gives the school a more reliable and efficient way to manage trust at scale."
600 student families. 2,500 certified academic records this year alone.
How it works.
When a document is produced, it enters an automated pipeline. A cryptographic fingerprint is created. The institution applies a digital signature. A tamper-proof timestamp records the exact moment of issuance. An integrity proof is anchored to a public blockchain.
The blockchain does not store the document. It certifies the truth of it.
Zero student data onchain. No biometrics. No hardware. Parents verify any document instantly through a dedicated page - without contacting the school, without exposing personal data.
This is Billions Network - the infrastructure behind it [4]
The technology behind the St. Peter's deployment is delivered through CertiEDUCA [5], built on Billions Network's identity infrastructure.
Not a concept. Not a roadmap. A live system, running in a real school, used by real families.
Billions has processed 2M+ verifications through the same cryptographic stack. The zero-knowledge library at its core - Circom - runs in infrastructure used by Worldcoin, TikTok, and 9,000+ other projects globally. Institutional partners include HSBC and Sony Bank. Across the broader ecosystem, over 1.2 million verifiable credentials have already been issued.
Evin McMullen, CEO of Billions Network:
"Academic credentials are among the most important documents a person carries through life. St. Peter's has built a system where the school retains full control, parents gain confidence, and students' data is never exposed. You own your records. You decide what to share. No one stores what they don't need."
The deployment was built with BLOOCK [6], the Barcelona-based deep-tech company behind CertiEDUCA - designed specifically for institutions that need certainty in their official communications.
Lluís Llibre, CEO of BLOOCK:
"Education is one of the sectors where the gap between digital distribution and digital trust is widest. Blockchain should be used to certify truth."
Why right now.
This is not a niche experiment.
The EU's European Blockchain Services Infrastructure [7] has already run cross-border verifiable credential pilots across 20+ countries - in education, social security, and business registries. The ecosystem is moving from pilot to production. A legal mandate for digital identity wallets across EU member states arrives in December 2026.
Every school, university, and institution issuing credentials in Europe will need this infrastructure. It already exists.
And beyond education: every AI agent entering the economy needs a verified identity. Every platform needs to know which agents are accountable. Billions built the Know Your Agent (KYA) framework before the market had a name for the problem.
A school in Barcelona proved it works.
An EU mandate means it scales.
An AI economy makes it permanent.
The Billions Network infrastructure is live. The families are real. The problem is $21 billion and growing.
Early infrastructure plays look like this. Quiet. Already deployed.
Already trusted with the futures of 600 families - and more to come.
Learn how institutions can prevent education certificate fraud: https://certieduca.com/hidden-costs-ebook/
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