How verification works
✒️ Digitally signed
Every certificate carries a digital signature created with the academy's ECDSA P-256 private key — the same elliptic-curve signature scheme that signs Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions, and the one you study in the Elliptic Curves stage.
🔍 Checked in your browser
Anyone — an employer or a registrar — can paste the token or scan the QR code. The signature is checked against the public key right here in the browser. Nothing is uploaded and no record of the lookup is kept.
🎯 Tamper-evident
Change a single character of the name, date or grade and the signature no longer matches — the certificate shows as invalid. The math makes forgery detectable.
honest note This is a free educational academy, so — like our leaderboard — it runs entirely in your browser with no server. The academy's signing key therefore lives in the page itself, which means this is a friendly, verifiable credential rather than a tamper-proof, employer-grade certification. It genuinely demonstrates real elliptic-curve signatures and verification — which is rather fitting for a cryptography course.