Storing digital certificates using blockchain

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate what the blockchain technology is and how it can be used to store digital certificates. Blockchain has gotten lots of attention since it was presented in 2008 for the digital currency Bitcoin. Certificates are present in many different industries. The work done in this thesis has an exploratory approach. The work performed consists of a case study and the development of an application based on the blockchain technology. The goal of the case study is to understand how certificates are stored and accessed today. The application was built with Hyperledger Sawtooth, an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation. In addition to this a literature study, focused on the blockchain technology, has been conducted. The results of the case study indicate that there is no single way to access certificates today. It depends on the industry, the body that issued the certificate and the underlying standard. There are attempts to gather certificates from different sources in one place, but these are not complete. The application developed attempts to solve the problems identified in the case study. Thanks to the blockchain technology it is transparent, secure and decentralized. This shows that the blockchain technology can be used to store digital certificates and can potentially create value if the application is developed further.