Open Badges — portable, verifiable credentials

The standard holds that a badge is a data object rather than an image: JSON naming the issuer, the recipient, the achievement with its criteria and evidence, and a means of verification; the metadata can be "baked" into a PNG or SVG so it travels inside the image file.

Precision matters here, because secondary write-ups routinely get it wrong. Open Badges 2.0 offered two verification types and only one of them was cryptographic: the more commonly deployed "hosted" variant carried no signature at all — verification meant fetching an HTTPS URL, so trust rested on DNS, TLS and the issuer keeping that URL alive. The "signed" variant used a JWS signature but was the minority. So the claim that "Open Badges have always been cryptographically verifiable" is false.

Open Badges 3.0 changed that: a badge is now a W3C Verifiable Credential carrying at least one cryptographic proof, aligned to the Verifiable Credentials data model. The specification defines JWT/JOSE and Linked Data proof formats. No blockchain is involved.

What the signature does and does not prove. It confirms that this issuer issued the badge and that the payload has not been altered. It does NOT prove the achievement was fairly assessed — that remains a question about the issuer's reputation, which in gslk's case means the value comes from a peer's confirmation attached to project evidence, not from the badge itself. Separately worth saying: the research on whether badges actually improve motivation or employment outcomes is a different, smaller and mixed literature — the technical maturity of the standard does not vouch for those claims.

Licensing: the specification is open and free to implement; you can issue and consume badges without joining anything. Only official 1EdTech conformance certification is gated, and it requires membership — so "1EdTech certified" is a claim only a member who has passed certification may make.