The licence is Product 01. Here’s why.

The number one strategic decision we made at Blastbeat in 2024 was simple: stop selling “the programme.” Start selling the licence. Same thing in the box, completely different posture.

Schools, sponsors, auditors, partners — everyone we deal with — finds it dramatically easier to understand a single, numbered, signed, time-bound credential than a fuzzy noun called “a programme.” A licence has an ID. A programme has a vibe.

What the licence actually is

The Blastbeat Licence is a yearly digital credential issued by Climate Actions Now group to one school for one academic year. It carries:

• A unique ID in the format BBE-LIC-YYYY-CLASS-NNNNN
• An ISO 8601 issue and expiry date
• A decentralised identifier (did:bbe:…)
• A SHA-style verification hash
• SDG mapping (4, 8, 9, 13, 17 by default)
• Two signatures (mine + a counter-signatory)
• A scannable verifier link

It exists in three formats: a printable PDF, a verifiable URL on our domain, and a machine-readable W3C Verifiable Credentials JSON record. See the live samples.

Why the framing changes everything

I’ll tell you the moment this clicked. A sponsor we were courting in late 2023 said something like, “I love the work, but I can’t put ‘the programme’ on my impact report.” She was right. ESG reporting, B-BBEE auditing, charity accounts — they all reward discrete, traceable units. A licence is a unit. A programme isn’t.

Once we made the switch, everything got cleaner:

The product catalogue, simplified

Here’s how the whole organisation now fits in a single hand:

That’s the whole catalogue. Everything we do feeds into 01 or flows out of it. Inside the office it changed how we talk about the work. Outside it changed how we sell.

Why W3C Verifiable Credentials

We didn’t want to invent credibility. We wanted to map onto a standard sponsors and auditors already trust. The W3C Verifiable Credentials data model¹ is the open standard for portable, cryptographically-signed digital credentials. It’s how the EU Digital Wallet works, how digital diplomas work in Norway and Australia, and how an increasing number of professional licences will work in the next decade.

By aligning the Blastbeat Licence with that data model now, we’re betting it’s readable by any compliant verifier — including ones that don’t exist yet.

What this unlocks for sponsors

If you’re a corporate sponsor, “Product 01” is what you actually buy when you adopt a school. Not a vibe. Not a relationship. One numbered licence, named to your brand, registered against Climate Actions Now group, mapped to the UN SDGs, and downloadable as both a printable PDF and a JSON record.

That’s the receipt. That’s the audit trail. That’s what your CSR team includes in the annual report.

What this unlocks for schools

For schools, the licence is the proof. It’s the document the principal puts on the wall, the link they put on the school website, and the line they cite when a journalist or a parent asks “what programme are you running?” The named licence answers that in one URL.

And renewal becomes a lot easier when there’s a clear “before” and “after” in the registry.

What we’re still figuring out

Two things we’re still building, transparently:

1. The public verification registry. Today the certificates are perfectly real samples. The verify endpoint is a placeholder. We’re shipping the v1 registry this year — expect a real /verify page where anyone can resolve a licence ID to its live record.
2. QR signing. The QR codes you see on the certificate samples are visual placeholders. As soon as the registry endpoint is live, they’ll resolve directly to the verifier.

That’s the honest state. The framing came first because that’s the strategic decision; the engineering follows.