The Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Cyprus offers an open-source platform for verification of digital certificates in a completely decentralized way; i.e. with no dependencies on the issuing institution or anyone else other than the blockchain.
ICPAC’s website can be used by anyone to validate their digital certificates. All new members, in addition to getting a physical certification, will also get a PDF copy of the certification with special metadata that anchors that certificate into the blockchain. For a member or any other third party to check the validity of the certification, please see instructions in the validator tool below. The PDF file to be used for validation, needs to be the specific one received from ICPAC.
Please note that the actual PDF of the certificate itself is not published on the blockchain, but rather a fingerprint of the PDF, which is enough to validate that the exact document was indeed published by ICPAC and timestamped by the blockchain.