## 1 Introduction  
The process of issuing and registering academic data is presently a process carried out within each educational institution's proprietary systems and largely isolated from other organizations' record-keeping procedures. This situation impacts directly the verification of students' educational data since, in many cases, the authentication of a transcript or certificate can only be performed manually, which is very costly in resources and time. With the growing need to demonstrate acquired abilities and skills in an increasingly competitive world, this situation favors the appearance of fake academic certificates, that come from five different sources: (1) \"degree mills\" that generate fake qualifications that are sold to customers that pay for them [1]; (2) fabricated documents that are generated by inexistent academic institutions [2]; (3) modified documents that alter authentic documents with false dates, courses, specializations, etc. ; (4) \"in-house\"-produced certificates, which are fake academic records created by a real institution and printed and sealed as if they were authentic but made by dishonest employees; and (5) inaccurate translations of authentic documents that are used to accomplish certain requirements in another country with a different language. Thus, the increasing number of fake accreditations and bogus academic information in a more and more connected society represents a real threat that must be addressed and solved. However, there are neither universally accepted standards to represent academic information nor centralized record-keeping systems for these types of records. Moreover, if a presently active institution discontinues its educational activities and disappears, all its educational data will probably vanish and the traceability between alumni and their original completed studies will be lost, which, in turn, prevents the verification of such studies by a third party. This affects both formal and informal learning, which seems to be increasingly relevant in future professional environments with initiatives such as the one promoted by Google [3], which plans to issue certificates for six-months online courses to students and treat them as the equivalent of a four-year degree if learners pretend to apply for a related job at the company. Amazon ([[https://aws.amazon.com/certification/?nc1=h_ls](https://aws.amazon.com/certification/?nc1=h_ls)]([https://aws.amazon.com/certification/?nc1=h_ls](https://aws.amazon.com/certification/?nc1=h_ls)) accessed on 2 April 2021) and Microsoft ([[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/)]([https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/)) accessed on 2 April 2021) (combining resources from LinkedIn and GitHub) develop similar initiatives. Furthermore, without a worldwide easily accessible academic information platform, it is not possible to obtain a general perspective of what type of studies, formal or even informal, are the most demanded, or compare how students from different countries acquire their qualifications. A trustful blockchain-based system can be a solution for these issues since it can tamperproof register academic information to be easily verified by third parties. However, it must be scalable and efficient to record all the related educational data, as well as protect the privacy of every piece of personal information, complying with applicable regulations. Insofar international regulations are concerned, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR [4]) is one of the most relevant and restrictive regulations insofar privacy is concerned for companies and institutions in Europe and in other countries since it provides an overarching coverage of all relevant issues in data protection and was conceived as a robust legal body able to cope with present-day and future challenges.