Designing, Deploying, and Testing a Chaincode for Educational Credentials Verification in a Hyperledger-Operated Blockchain Network

Abstract

The attractiveness of distributed ledger technology as a platform for the implementation of digitalized inter-organizational business processes stems from its inherent ability to handle the lack of trust and transparency between organizations. A blockchain is a classification of distributed ledgers that contains blocks, involving list of data connected by cryptography. Every block has a timestamp, a cryptographic hash of the previous block, and a few transaction details. It is commonly used for financial transactions in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, popularly known as cryptocurrencies. However, other than this use-case, implementing it in traditional information systems is explored in this paper. The study used Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) to create a permissioned network that supports a distributed ledger, smart contracts (chaincode) and various participants who invoke the transactions on the ledger. Several functions is embedded in the chaincode design as deemed necessary in the analysis of educational verification process of higher educational institutions (HEI). For this scenario, blockchain was believed to be appropriate to address trust, security, privacy, and transparency concerns because this technology prevents data or transactions from being altered once they are saved in a blockchain database. Since it creates an irreversible record, it practically becomes impossible to alter. Any changes to the database provide consistency and completeness by requiring new data blocks to be added to the current chain of blocks in chronological sequence. The blockchain network was interacted upon through Application Programming Interfaces (API). The performance assessment confirmed that the chaincode is working and the functions work as expected. Numerous readings of the response time and the payload size were recorded and kept as results for the endpoint testing of the chaincode. It can be assumed that using blockchain to improve the drawbacks of centralized and/or traditional information systems is viable.