DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A BLOCKCHAIN- BASED CERTIFICATE VERIFICATION

This study presents the design and implementation of a blockchain-based certificate verification system created to address the issues of academic forgery and slow/manual certificate verification process among universities and employers across Nigeria. The system makes use of a hybrid architecture consisting of Quorum private blockchain with a FastAPI backend, MongoDB for storage off-chain and a React based frontend. The system makes use of role-based access with the user roles defines as Admin, Issuer, and Verifier ensuring security and controlled interactions. Certificates are Issued using smart contracts and the FastAPI backend, taking certificate metadata from the institution or authorized issuer and generating a cryptographic hash using the SHA-256 algorithm, the certificate metadata and hash is stored on the MongoDB database for efficient querying and the has is issued to the Quorum blockchain. Results demonstrated the system being Tamper-proof in certificate issuance, offer real-time verification, and handles increase in load without a significant reduction in performance. With the implementation of Json Web Token JWT the system was resistant to various attacks ensuring immutability and transparency of the system and usability testing demonstrated the systems accessibility to multiple stakeholders through the role-based user dashboard. During testing the system demonstrated acceptable performance with average certificate issuance and verification times of 9.1 ms and 11.4 ms respectively. The system also achieved a throughput of 110 and 88 operations per second proving the speed and ability of the system to maintain sustained performance over extended periods. Findings demonstrate blockchain’s potential to improve the trust and accountability of the Nigerian education system where credential fraud is evident. The study concludes on how viable blockchain solutions are as a potential adopted system providing a decentralized, scalable, and cost effective, approach to certificate verification that can be implemented in other institutions and countries where similar issuer exists.