Hello Guyz,
We’re having our own private consortium network based on ethereum. Usually we use it for deploying our smart contracts and configure the truffle.js to connect to our network instead of main or ropsten network. Is it possible to modify cert-issuer in such a way to use our consortium network ? As of now the conf_ethtest.ini is having support for only ropsten and mainnet. Since blockcerts is not based on smart contracts we cant use truffle.js config we normally use. Have you guys ever tried similar things or any idea to solve this? We cannot use the mainnet or testnet since it uses 100’s of GBs of Data and also we have more control in our consortium network.
For curiosity, why would you want to use the BlockCerts standard on your own network ? If you are on your blockchain, I don’t see the value of using BlockCerts instead of a smart contract.
Then, cert-issuer in Ethereum uses Etherscan’s API to sign the transactions. Which of course is not available for private networks (I guess). You may also need to modify cert-verifier-js (I didn’t check yet what it uses) and you wouldn’t be able to use the BlockCerts.org webcomponent and mobile app.
For cert-issuer, we have the ability to do this with bitcoin, which I believe is the regtest version, if you’ve looked at that, which uses a local bitcoind node.
For using a local ethereum node, we have not yet added that feature. Right now we use API’s for viewing / verifying / broadcasting ethereum transactions.
If you had an endpoint for handling your private ethereum transactions, you could add them to the blockchain_handlers/ethereum/connectors.py and remove the existing ones. Likewise you’d need to do that for cert-verifier-js.
@Thank You aron. We are trying the same for past few days and since etherscan is not available for private networks we are trying with some other opensource APIs like Ethplorer etc. So we are modifying a major part of connectors.py and also trying to add support to the local host for ethereum. And also we are working on cert-core to store jsons in external distributed mongodb server. It will open some new possibilities.
As of now, just for fun and learning. And we’re also curious as well to know about it’s performance. Well, we believe it will open some more possibilities and help us to add more cryptocurrency support.
Thanks for the info, looking forward from reading about your work 
Hi, we are also interested in using Blockcerts for a private ethereum consortium. Do you happen to have your code open source/is it functional for a private ethereum blockchain? Please let me know, I would be happy to discuss further.
The Max Planck Digital Library would be interested in utilizing Blockcerts for issuing certificates on private consortium network. From my research, Blockcerts looks easier/better/more secure for verifiability from independent parties not actively particating in the network.
I was looking for something akin to Metamask where I could plug in the Private Network address and I could retrieve certificates issued on that specific blockchain.
I couldn’t see if this was on the roadmap, but would be interesting for us.