OrioChain: A Decentralized Document Verification Framework Integrating Ethereum Smart Contracts, IPFS, and SHA-256 Cryptographic Hashing

Abstract

Centralized document authentication infrastructures are inherently susceptible to insider manipulation, single-point-of-failure outages, and operationally slow manual verification workflows. This paper introduces OrioChain, a production-deployed, decentralized verification framework that addresses these architectural weaknesses by combining Ethereum smart contracts, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage, and SHA-256 cryptographic fingerprinting. The system enforces a three-tier rolebased access control (RBAC) hierarchy-comprising Admin, Exporter, and Public roles-exclusively through on-chain Solidity logic, with no reliance on off-chain middleware. Document content is hashed locally within the client browser prior to any network transmission; only the resulting 32-byte fingerprint is persisted to the Ethereum Sepolia blockchain, while the source file is stored on IPFS via Infura and Pinata. This hybrid architecture reduces on-chain gas expenditure by roughly 80 percent relative to storing full document content on-chain. Public verification requires neither a cryptocurrency wallet nor any gas expenditure, and consistently completes in under two seconds with 100 percent hash-match accuracy across all experimental trials. QR code generation at the point of registration enables smartphone-based instant verification for non-technical end users. A structured comparison against nine contemporaneous systems confirms that OrioChain is the sole evaluated implementation that simultaneously delivers gasless public verification, three-tier on-chain RBAC, QR-driven access, and soft-deletion with a preserved immutable audit trail. The architecture supports future migration to Layer-2 networks and is designed for eventual conformance with W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credential (VC) standards.