Enhancing Digital Trust and Evaluation in Education Through a Scalable Blockchain-Based Certificate Management System

Educational certificates such as diplomas, transcripts, and professional credentials play a critical role in verifying individual qualifications and maintaining trust in the education sector. However, increasing incidents of certificate fraud, along with the limitations of conventional management systems that depend heavily on centralized databases or paperbased records, create vulnerabilities to manipulation, data loss, and inefficiency. These challenges highlight the need for a more secure, transparent, and scalable approach to certificate management. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized, immutable, and auditable characteristics, offers a promising solution to these issues. This study presents the design and evaluation of a prototype system for managing educational certificates using a permissioned blockchain framework. The system introduces a hybrid architecture that integrates a centralized database management system (DBMS) as a caching and validation layer with decentralized blockchain storage. This layered approach reduces direct load on blockchain peers, ensures pre-submission validation, and supports scalability while maintaining security and trust across institutions. Performance testing was conducted using Hyperledger Caliper to evaluate system throughput and efficiency. Results show that the prototype achieves a peak throughput of 271.1 transactions per second (TPS) for querying and 180 TPS for certificate submission, which significantly surpasses the performance reported in previous studies. These improvements are attributed to optimized chaincode design and the implementation of transaction flow control through batching and rate management. Overall, the proposed hybrid architecture demonstrates both the practicality and effectiveness of applying blockchain in modern educational certificate management.