About
A credential is only useful if someone can check it.
Digital badges spread quickly because they are easy to issue and easy to share. The same qualities make them easy to fake. A badge image is a picture, and a picture can be edited by anyone with a design tool and ten minutes. What separates a real credential from a convincing one is the data inside it and the signature over that data.
Most people who receive a badge have no way to inspect either. They see an image in an email or a line on a profile and have to decide whether to believe it. Issuing platforms do offer verification, but usually only for the badges they issued themselves, on a page wearing their own branding. That is fine for their customers and useless for everyone else.
This site exists to fill that gap. Drop in any Open Badge, from any platform, and get the same treatment: the credential is parsed, matched against the published schema for its type, its signature is verified against the issuer key, and its revocation status is read from wherever the issuer publishes it. No account, no quota, no branding on the answer.
The checks follow published standards, not a platform-specific allow list. A credential gets the same report regardless of which issuer created it.
In short
- Runs on
- Open Badges 3.0 and W3C VC
- Price
- Free, no account
- Stored data
- None
- Vendor bias
- None, by design
01Principles
Five rules we hold ourselves to.
Every issuer, one standard
The validator reads the credential, not the brand on it. Every issuer goes through the same published checks, and the result depends on the badge itself.
Free, with nothing behind it
No account, no quota, no upsell on the result screen. Fake credentials get easier to pass off when checking one is a chore, so checking one should cost nothing.
Credit where it belongs
Open Badges exists because 1EdTech, the W3C credentials community, and a long line of open source maintainers built it. We implement their work and link to it on every page that leans on it.
Nothing is kept
Credentials are processed in memory and dropped when the response is written. No storage, no analytics profile on the validation page, no third party pixel watching you check a badge.
Plain results
Each check is reported separately, with the code the specification uses and a sentence about what to do next. A result you cannot act on is not a result.
02Credit
Standing on other people's work.
Open Badges began in 2011 as a Mozilla project and became a formal specification under 1EdTech, which maintains it today. Version 3.0 rebuilt badges on the W3C Verifiable Credentials data model, so a badge is now a verifiable credential with an achievement inside it.
None of that is ours. We implement the published specifications, rely on open source libraries written by the credentials community, and link to both wherever this site depends on them. If you work on these standards and see us misrepresenting something, write to us and we will correct it.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, and bug reports are all welcome.