Certo: An Open Source Platform for Open Badges 3.0

[TheJoin95]

Certo is an open source platform for issuing, managing, and verifying credentials using the Open Badges 3.0 standard. It’s designed to support communities, nonprofits, workshops, and conferences that want to issue portable, standards-compliant credentials without relying on proprietary solutions.

The platform allows organizations to issue credentials as Open Badge 3.0, compatible with decentralized identity standards and interoperable across ecosystems thanks to a signed JSON-LD from the issuer platform.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/schroedinger-hat/certo

## Why Certo

As part of the Schrödinger Hat community, we frequently organize technical events, workshops, meetups, and conferences. Over time, we saw a recurring need: a simple and trustworthy way to issue certificates that recipients could store, verify, and reuse.

PDFs and badge images are not verifiable or portable. On the other hand, Open Badges 3.0 (OBv3), based on the W3C Verifiable Credentials model, offers a format that is digitally signed, machine-verifiable, and compatible with decentralized identity systems.

Existing platforms that support OBv3 are often closed-source or too complex to deploy for small organizations. Certo was created to solve this gap and it’s open source.