Blockchain for Verification and Storage of Academic Credentials to Prevent Academic Credential Fraud: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Academic fraud includes the falsification of academic credentials, which damages the image of educational institutions and impacts labor in the marketplace worldwide. As much as digital credentialing reduces forgeries, a centralized system will always have vulnerabilities and counterfeiting and data security risks. This paper uses a systematic literature review that explores blockchain-based solutions for storing and verifying the authenticity of higher education academic institutions' credentials. It looks into related research published from 2020 to 2025 and follows PRISMA guidelines involving the screening of 144 studies and results in a full-text review of 30 studies. The review involves comparing blockchain-based systems in use and conducting an assessment of their effectiveness, scalability, and real-world applications. Then the data derived are analyzed through three themes, which present blockchain technologies that are widely used in educational systems, whether these technologies are applicable to be locally implemented in Bhutan, and the use cases and functional applications. From these extracted themes, findings such as the benefits, consequences, and comparison of traditional means to the blockchain applications have been derived and discussed thoroughly in this paper. Some critical findings include 74% of the studies having the potential to be implemented locally and Ethereum and Smart Contracts being commonly used platforms, representing 45% and 21% of studies, respectively.