Management of Academic Credentials via Hybrid Blockchain and Off-Chain Storage

The privacy, security, and stability of issuing academic credentials are a problem due to the disjointed verification policies, exposure to fake records, and privacy risks in centralized systems. Verifying academic documents is critical in online learning systems that are repeatedly being expanded. Issuing flexible records, a privacy-conscious system, and secure records as well. To resolve this specific problem and also preserve the accuracy of data, to solve these problems and ensure the accuracy of data, and to perform long-term integrity tests. Another topic of this study is the possibility of having a hybrid blockchain paradigm, which uses off-chain storage. Based on the multimodal inputs such as document images, signatures, OCR yields, and metadata of the publicly available databases, an experimental system was developed and tested. The system is a combination of a permissioned blockchain based on a governance system, zk-rollup-enabled authentication, and layered decentralized storage (IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave). The results are significant improvements compared to the baseline and hybrid baselines, including a reduction of 82 percent of verified latency, a 100-fold rise in throughput, a reduction of 96 percent of on-chain expenditures, and higher authenticity detection (AUROC 0.94, EER 1.9%). The research confirms the existence of zk-rollup-based hybrid blockchain structures that can provide a secure, verifiable, and fast foundation for the upcoming academic credential systems without compromising the high user data confidentiality.