CertificateChain: decentralized healthcare training certificate management system using blockchain and smart...

Managing training certificates is an important issue in research that can lead to serious issues if not addressed properly. For institutions that currently do not have a dedicated management system for these training certificates, a central database is the most typical solution. However, such a system suffers from several risks, such as a single-point-of-failure.

To address this issue, we developed and evaluated CertificateChain, a decentralized training certificate management system by using peer-to-peer blockchain and automated smart contracts. We developed an efficient certificate dividing-and-merging algorithm to overcome the transaction size limit on blockchain.

We performed experiments on the system to evaluate its performance, then created a web app and tested the system in a real-world scenario. CertificateChain scaled linearly in terms of time compared with the total number of certificates added and could be quickly queried for existing data stored on-chain.

CertificateChain was able to store and retrieve the training certificates on the blockchain network, with limitations including a comparative analysis of other systems, evaluation of different consensus protocols, examining certificates off-chain, a thorough comparison with a centralized system, and the extension to the main public Ethereum network.

We believe that these results indicate that blockchain technology could be a viable decentralized alternative to traditional databases in this use case. Our software is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6257094.