Ilya Nikiforov is the co-founder of Disciplina, a multifunctional blockchain for projects in the educational and recruiting spheres. He was a seasoned businessman with 14-years experience in wholesale and retail and e-commerce field. Whereafter, in 2016, he found an idea of building a blockchain-based platform within the educational ecosystem.

This Monday, we (8btc News) were honored to invite Ilya to demonstrate how can blockchain benefit human being in the educational field.

Ilya believes the education market has a lot of possibilities and a big future. He told us a little story about how he comes up with the idea of starting his educational business in 2017.

Ilya is an extreme sports lover. When he went to California for a holiday with his wife, he wanted to go surfing at Pacific beach. However, as he used to live in Russia where has little place for surfing, Ilya is lack of surfing skills and needs a professional coach for training.

Unfortunately, he found it was very hard to find valuable educational information on Google. In the end, he was not able to find a coach and started to think about building an educational platform that can make it easier for people to find educational information they want easily.

Although there are many educational platforms on the internet, the information is scattered. People cannot find comprehensive systematized educational information from one single website.

In addition, Ilya also thought about there were many people that study a lot of courses online, just like his wife, but how can an employer get all these information as well as the personal achievements they got.

Furthermore, the educational process is not ending when you graduate from university, people are still converting their working experience into their own knowledge and that’s why employers are always interested in employees’ past work experiences, which is also valuable.

Ilya sees the huge gaps between companies and educational institutions and aiming to build a platform to connect all the educational resources into one ecosystem. After giving the access to companies that are looking for employees, they would be able to check the actual skill level of interested candidates.According to Ilya, blockchain is a very important element in his platform model because it will empower the searching request. People can analyze information in the original database without downloading them, which may prevent data leaking and ensure the data privacy.

“Blockchain can make a system smooth and self-living when you don’t really need a centralized controlling center,” said Ilya.

Ilya also indicated that the technical team is the core of a blockchain project, without them, an application can never come into being. The development team of Disciplina mainly consists of the core developers of Cardano and Serokell projects.

Ilya said he just meet his developers ‘in the right time’ when they just finished their job in Cardano development in September of 2017. Ilya spent a lot of time in demonstrating his ideal to those developers and they finally decided to join in.

It is also worth noting that, Disciplina is building its own blockchain especially for storing the private data and private information instead of simply using the existing Ethereum or EOS blockchain. Ilya demonstrated that Disciplina can definitely be built on other blockchains such as Ethereum, but the system will be much less functional, much slower and much more complicated and not all of their ideas can be realized on another blockchain.

Disciplina will store confidential information, such as the courses, students’ tasks, grades, and test results. Therefore, public blockchain solutions, which store all of their transactions in open access — Ethereum or EOS, for example — are unacceptable. At the same time, private blockchain solutions, such as Hyperledger, do not provide enough verifiability of the data stored on them.

“we have to build a system that makes people understand that their data is securely stored and that why we need to find solutions in blockchain because we need to overcome the problem with privacy, and we actually made it.”

In the Disciplina system, users are not able to edit their account, they only have the option to make their profile visible or invisible. But to these users who are currently looking for a job, it is better to make their profile visible instead of hiding them.

Ilya also emphasized that their business model is based on the searching request. This platform will enable companies to make a searching request to the chain with accurate skill level they want to find employees they need. The Disciplina token (DSCP) can be used for making those searching request to proceed. However, instead of going straight to the platform, those tokens would be split and sent to databases or academic institutions that providing a searching result.

Whereas, no one would be able to search somebody by name. People can only make a search request based on a particular skill level, and the platform will provide users that meet the request.

In addition, companies can also upload the CVs they got on the Disciplina blockchain to verify the accuracy of employees’ past educational information and past working experience.

Furthermore, companies can also build their own applications based on the Disciplina open-source blockchain, for example, they may make a test to confirm the skills of employees which enables them to find some genius self-educated developers.

Ilya indicated that their development team is doing everything well according to their roadmap. They have launched an alpha version of Disciplina. The technical team has finished the development of the system that enables educational institutions to upload their student data although it would not be fully decentralized or fully functional yet. Disciplina has also complete the test token supply in their ecosystem.

At present, they are heading to the fully functional test net which plans to be developed by Q1 2019 according to the roadmap.

This blockchain project has also gotten support from Russia State University and other large educational institutions. They have also finished the verification application to get 18 universities in Russia to join in their blockchain.