Your diploma is a NFT – Mongolian students receiving honors on a polygon chain

by James · November 4, 2022

National University of Mongolia Receives Soulbound Tokens on PoS Chain

In an unusual move to higher education, the team behind Polygon, the Layer 2 blockchain, plans to allow students at the National University of Mongolia (NUM) to receive their diplomas as Soulbound Tokens on-chain, the project so on Thursday.

“In a world where fake diplomas are problematic, it is commendable that NUM, … together with the Ministry of Education and Science, is linking diplomas with blockchain,” tweeted Polygon.

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Academic credentials

Soulbound Tokens are a type of non-transferable and non-funded NFTs proposed in May by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and chief scientist. Buterin said SBTs can be used to establish reputation and provenance in the chain, suggesting the tokens could be used for academic credentials, web3 credit ratings or online membership.

The project plans to offer tokens on Polygon’s PoS chain, which is a side chain designed to offer low-cost transactions compared to Ethereum’s mainnet. It has a total value locked at $1.3 billion, according to DeFi Llama.

The news comes a day after Meta announced that it will soon launch a toolkit that will enable Instagram influencers to create and sell polygon-based NFTs. Instagram and Facebook also launched features that allow users to share Polygon, Ethereum, and Flow-based NFTs in August.

Polygon also announced that NUM launched a virtual headquarters on its chain called Meta University in partnership with Octagon Marketplace, an NFT Marketplace, Guyuk Metaverse, a local web3 open-world project. Students, graduates and staff can stamp one of six different NUM NFTs depicting anthropomorphized birds of prey to use as an avatar in the virtual space.

Taking steps

Octagon, a local NFT and digital asset exchange, has also created 30,000 NFTs that will be distributed to NUM students. Students are encouraged to share the NFTs on Instagram. Polygon added that it has lined up similar plans with other top universities in Mongolia.

While Mongolia has typically lagged behind in crypto adoption, data from blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis indicates that the country’s web3 sector has made progress over the past year.

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Chainalysis’ 2020 Global Cryptocurrency Adoption Index report ranked Mongolia among the lowest ranked countries for web3 growth with an impact score of zero. But Chainalysis’ 2022 report said Mongolia posted the second-biggest 12-month on-chain transaction volume increase for the Asian region at 72% from June 2022.

However, the total value of cryptocurrency received in Mongolia was still very low compared to other countries, placing the country 84th overall for crypto adoption according to Chainalysis’ rankings.