The story of Block.co can be traced back to 2014 when the University of Nicosia identified a need for secure and self-verifiable documents. A growing market in forged documents and the vulnerability of certification documents in the face of manmade and natural disasters meant a solution was increasingly necessary.

Given UNIC’s early immersion in the blockchain world with the launching in 2014 of the first Master’s degree globally in Digital Currencies and Blockchain technology, it was clear to them that blockchain technology was best suited to fulfill that role. They needed a solution with documents that would be vendor independent and without a central point of potential failure, and that would outlive the issuing institution itself. So, in 2015 UNIC became the first university globally to experiment with the deployment of blockchain in the issuance of academic certificates. They were confident there was no safer or more secure application than that of blockchain technology and particularly no safer blockchain than the Bitcoin blockchain.

It quickly became clear that it was not solely academia that could benefit from the reliable credential authentication that blockchain technology offered. Block.co was born with the objective of taking the initial learnings and expanding the product beyond education to other industries as well as government – indeed to any organization or sector that issued documents whose authenticity and immutability they wanted to secure.