A Smart Contract–Enabled Private Ethereum Blockchain for Secure Academic Transcript Verification

Abstract

Forgery and delayed validation of transcripts by Nigerian universities had necessitated the development of reliable systems. Inadequacies in manual, centralized approaches had been characterized by inefficiencies, high chances of corruption, and forgery of academic documents. In this paper, an Ethereum blockchain solution for the Management of Computerized Instructional Universities (MCIU) was presented to guarantee authenticity, reliability, and confidentiality of student transcripts. This proposed solution incorporated Solidity smart contracts on a private Ethereum network for handling transactions related to the issuance, reissuance, and validation of transcripts where transcript files were stored on the decentralized file storage (Swarm), while only hashes of the transcript files were recorded on the blockchain. React and Node.js technologies were employed in designing both client and server sides of the system. Authorized personnel were able to issue digital verifiable transcripts, and third parties were able to validate issued transcripts within seconds through a secure coding process.