Glossary
What Is Digital Badge?
A digital badge is a visual mark of an achievement that carries its own data — who earned it, who issued it, and what it took — inside the badge rather than in a separate record.
What it's for
A badge is a credential built to be seen. Where a certificate is a document you file away, a badge is a small mark designed to sit on a profile, in an email signature, or in a row of other badges — and to be understood at a glance.
The design is only half of it. The other half is that the badge carries its own evidence: click it and you get the issuer, the criteria, the date, and a way to check it. A badge that's only an image is a sticker.
How it works
Most badges follow the Open Badge standard, which pins down the fields every badge should carry:
- Issuer — who awarded it, with a verifiable identity.
- Achievement — what it represents, and the criteria for earning it.
- Recipient — who earned it.
- Dates — when it was awarded, and when it lapses, if it does.
- Evidence — optionally, a link to the work that earned it.
Older badges were "baked": the metadata was written into the PNG or SVG file itself, so the image travelled with its own data. Newer ones under Open Badge 3.0 carry a cryptographic signature instead, which is harder to strip and doesn't depend on the image surviving intact.
Where you'll see it
Cloud and software certifications — AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Salesforce all issue them — plus universities, professional bodies, and internal training programmes. On LinkedIn they usually land in Licenses & certifications. Badges also do well in communities: CTF teams, hackathons and open-source projects use them because they're compact, visual, and easy to collect.
In Verifycate
You can design badge-shaped credentials in the editor — there's a badge canvas preset at 500×300, alongside the A4 and Letter sizes — and every certificate is issued as an Open Badge 3.0 credential regardless of its shape. So a wide landscape certificate and a small square badge get the same verifiable credential behind them; what differs is the artwork.
We don't bake metadata into the image file. The credential is a signed JSON document downloadable from the recipient's page, and the QR code on the design points to the verification page.
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Common questions
- What's the difference between a digital badge and a certificate?
- Mostly form and intent. A certificate is a full-page document meant to be read and printed; a badge is a compact visual mark meant to be displayed alongside others. Both can carry the same credential data underneath.
- Can anyone copy a digital badge image?
- Yes, and that's fine — the image was never the proof. Copying the picture doesn't copy the credential behind it, which is why a badge worth anything always links back to a verification page.
- Do digital badges work on LinkedIn?
- Recipients can add them to Licenses & certifications, which shows the name, issuer, dates and a link to the credential. LinkedIn doesn't display the badge artwork in that section — it shows the entry and the link.
Related terms
- Open BadgeAn Open Badge is a digital achievement in a shared, machine-readable format, so the same badge can be checked and displayed by software that had nothing to do with issuing it.
- Digital CredentialA digital credential is any record of an achievement, qualification or membership issued in a form a computer can read and check, rather than as a printed document or a flat file.
- Micro-credentialA micro-credential certifies one specific skill or competency rather than a whole programme of study, so it can be earned in hours or weeks instead of years.
- E-certificateAn e-certificate is a certificate issued and delivered electronically instead of on paper — at minimum a file, and at best a link anyone can open and check.
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