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Renowned DEFI MOOC course awards its students the first Privacy-preserving NFTs, powered on Oasis Network.

DeFi MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) where Oasis Labs Founder Professor Dawn Song is a lead instructor, will award NFTs and badges as course credentials. These NFTs will utilize the Oasis Platform’s secure data governance API, Parcel, allowing the credentials to be verified while user information is kept private.

The first lectures of DeFi MOOC were presented in August last year by Professor Song, Christine Parlour (University of California, Berkeley), Dan Boneh (Stanford), Andrew Miller (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Arthur Gervais (Imperial College London). Since then, the course has attracted many thousands of students from over 30 countries worldwide and currently has more than 180K lecture views.

The MOOC NFT collection uses MetaMirror — a private Web3 identity solution — and our privacy-enhancing technology to protect the data of those who receive them. Since wallets and credentials are mapped inside the Parcel environment, the DeFi MOOC team, or anyone else, will not be able to match an individual student’s email address to its wallet address.

Keeping personal information separate from wallet addresses is core to the success of this NFT. Oasis allows for students to retain wallet privacy from teaching staff and anyone else viewing the NFT certificate, while still having verifiable proof of completion..

Given the desire to have both a tradable NFT and a non-tradable certificate, the DeFi MOOC team will issue certificate badges in addition to the DeFi MOOC NFT, which uses Oasis’ privacy-enhancing solution.

It is the privacy considerations around sensitive academic data that have prompted DeFi MOOC to use Oasis Network for their confidential NFT certificates. Traditional NFTs do not have the functionality to keep sensitive data private while authenticating, in this case, course completion.

As this use-case highlights, NFTs, when equipped with privacy preserving capabilities, have the potential to be used in real-world settings.

Bringing Confidentiality to NFTs

NFTs have a big role to play in the future, but it is when data can be controlled by the individual, and privacy-preserving techniques are used, that we start to see the functionality.

Parcel offers a collection of APIs that emphasize users’ data privacy in this NFT. The data that is uploaded to Parcel is encrypted. This data can be taken as an input by programs, which will then execute in a confidential computing environment before storing the results back in Parcel.

Parcel is already integrated with the Metamirror NFT marketplace, allowing our flagship confidential NFT collection, bishop’s Army of Minions, to be launched. In this NFT collection, owners of the NFTs also have access to the underlying mathematical function that created their Minions, stored as private data, thanks to Parcel.

How it Works

MBuddy, a Web3 identity infrastructure, will store the students’ course achievement badge, which will take the form of a Soulbound Token — Soulbound tokens are another type of NFT that are permanent and non-transferable.

To get this badge, while keeping their user data safe, students will provide the DeFi MOOC team with a randomly generated UUID string, which becomes the credential ID. MetaMirror then stores the ID in the appropriate Parcel account.

No one can see the interlinking between the users’ wallet addresses and credential IDs. This mapping will be directly uploaded to each user’s Parcel account and be protected with TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology. MetaMirror’s algorithm will run inside Parcel to access such mapping to issue NFTs and badges, and Parcel enforces the privacy of the mapping using TEE.

MetaMirror calculates the certification attribute (e.g., Honorary, Legendary, Ninja, and Trailblazer tiers) in Parcel, based on the users’ credential ID. After the execution, Parcel will sign the result, to prove that the MBuddy attribute is calculated in Parcel.

Meanwhile, MetaMirror also implants a private key in Parcel to sign the calculated MBuddy attribute, to prove that the attribute is calculated by MBuddy’s attribute generation algorithm.

Real-world NFT application

The boom of mainstream NFT interest highlighted the potential for these blockchain assets. However, the move toward Web3 and a stronger focus on privacy and data sovereignty have shown the need for more functional NFTs.

Confidential NFTs, such as bishops Army of Minions, and the use of Oasis’ privacy-preserving technology in the DeFi MOOC certificates, highlight the real-world application of privacy-enhanced NFTs for a Web3 world.

Please head to our blog for more information about the technology empowering this unique decentralized identity solution. Additionally, you can follow our social channels.

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