About this artifact
University of Nicosia (Cyprus) — the first university to anchor academic certificates on Bitcoin, for its DFIN-511 'Introduction to Digital Currencies' MOOC. Beyond timestamping, UNicDC is a credential-management protocol — it also revokes previously issued certificates and records other certificate-lifecycle operations on-chain (later the Block.co spin-out), so it is not only a notary. This is the earliest UNicDC batch on-chain (block 320303, 2014-09-12), anchoring Merkle root f4f4f3dd52c8023dd855e9d22a46b303e82d09a0e9944d46dc06192d1c2cbbcf; its date matches the protocol's documented genesis. Two more batches followed within days, each from a fresh signing address — including the one CoinDesk reported on 2014-09-16 (tx cb4f0cf471ac262096162484f51abcf1a0a6a2c9db21a4e2f5abbe41860d3ca0, block 320803, 2014-09-15). UNIC later restarted the program in January 2017 from a dedicated address (1A94iDxxJijPvo8CjCWe4GLUfT6BGTWuUq, block 448967), which has issued 110+ batches since and migrated to the CRED-wrapped format in December 2017.
