SECURE ACADEMIC CREDENTIAL MANAGEMENT AND VERIFICATION USING BLOCKCHAIN
The concept of meritocracy is threatened by the pervasive falsification of educational credentials, which compromises the integrity of both academic institutions and employment markets. Fraud detection and prevention are challenging due to the fragmented, unsecure, and ineffective nature of traditional certificate verification techniques. With its built-in characteristics of immutability, decentralization, and tamper resistance, blockchain technology offers a viable answer to these problems. However, the scope of current blockchainbased systems is constrained; they usually only cover particular educational levels or institutions and lack full capability. In this paper, we present ElimuChain, a unified blockchain-based system for managing and verifying academic credentials across all educational levels and establishments in a nation. Employers and educational institutions may authenticate all of an individual's certifications from a single platform thanks to the system's centralized verification portal. ElimuChain is a decentralized application (DApp) built on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) that uses IPFS for safe document storage and smart contracts for automatic certificate issuance. The implementation shows that the suggested method is affordable, scalable, and able to expedite the certification and verification procedure. When compared to current systems, performance evaluations show improved efficiency in terms of transaction throughput and latency. With an emphasis on its applicability in the Tanzanian context, this study confirms the potential of blockchain in creating a strong, transparent, and trustworthy educational credentialing environment