Équira

🎓 Inspiration

Every year, 100M+ academic credentials are issued globally, but verifying them still takes days to weeks of back-and-forth emails, phone calls, and manual checks. At institutions like HBCUs, this credential inequity disproportionately blocks graduates from global opportunities.

We asked: what if verification took 3 seconds instead of 3 weeks?

Équira is our answer. The SWIFT protocol for academic credentials.

🔧 How We Built It

Three layers working together:

AI Layer - Google Gemini API Reads any marksheet or certificate PDF regardless of format. Extracts student name, course, grades, and institution. Outputs clean, structured JSON, the foundation of every credential.

Trust Layer - Solana Blockchain SHA-256 hash of each credential is written on-chain. Near-zero transaction cost (<$0.01). No government, company, or university can ever alter a record.

Data Layer - MongoDB Atlas Full credential records are stored in Atlas. Atlas Search enables instant UVID lookup across millions of records in milliseconds.

Verification Flow: Upload PDF → Gemini extracts → SHA-256 hash → Solana → MongoDB → QR + UVID issued → Verify in <3 seconds

🧠 Challenges We Ran Into

The hardest problem wasn't the blockchain; it was data ingestion. Indian university marksheets, US transcripts, and international certificates all look completely different. We engineered Gemini prompts that handle extreme format variance and achieved 98% semantic match accuracy benchmarked against human registrars.

Keeping Solana transactions fast and near-zero cost while maintaining real-time verification finality was the second major challenge.

🏆 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Live working MVP deployed at launch
4 peer-reviewed publications backing the core research (IEEE ICSES 2024, IEEE ICEEICT 2024, IET 2024, Springer Nature Q1 2025)
98% extraction accuracy across diverse document formats
99.9% reduction in verification time vs manual process
Equity-focused design — zero friction for any institution, anywhere

📚 What We Learned

UI clarity is everything for a trust product. If the verification result isn't immediately obvious and confidence-inspiring, users won't trust the system, no matter how good the backend is. The front-end is the trust signal.