Blockchain-Based Academic Certificate Verification System

Counterfeit academic certificates mass production leads to ethical challenges, making people lose confidence in both

educational organizations and global employers. The current methods of certificates’ validation rely on central databases and

administrative procedures, which makes them extremely time- consuming, costly, and vulnerable to single point of failure.

Thus, a scalable and fully decentralized approach towards academic certificate verification based on Ethereum blockchain

technology and IPFS is proposed, designed, and examined within this paper. The system architecture relies on backend written

with the help of Node.js, frontend implemented in React, and lightweight yet safe communication between blockchain and clientside performed by Ethers.js library. Through implementation of a properly designed strategy of research, the roles for each

participant of the application: Issuer, User, and Verifier are defined. In order to reduce excessive fees for storing data in the

blockchain, an approach of including files in IPFS and keeping only their corresponding CIDs within Ethereum contract is

implemented. Finally, support for automatic QR-code generation to make verification easy and reliable is included in the system.

Tests were performed to verify the reliability and efficiency of the system, using 300 academic certificates and measur- ing its

ability to work efficiently when handling up to 400 concurrent users. The tests show the speed of 10 to 20 seconds for a

transaction and minimum gas cost of about 0.49percertificateatproductionleveldeployment. The results obtained clearly confirm

that the proposed ap- proach allows to ensure a highly reliable data security, completely exclude any possible counterfeiting of

certificates, and provide an economically efficient approach to modern academic credentials management.