Year: 2026 | Month: June | Volume 14 | Issue 1
Blockchain System in Higher Education: Issues and Challenges — A Scientific Review
Umesh Sarkar* and Jayati Lahiri Dey
DOI:10.30954/2322-0465.01.2026.9
Abstract:
Blockchain technology offers powerful solutions to one of higher education’s most persistent challenges: the cumbersome and fraud-prone process of credential verification. Traditional methods of authenticating academic certificates are slow, manual, and resource-intensive. Blockchain promises to solve this by creating a secure, decentralized, and immutable digital ledger, enabling instant and permanent verification of degrees and academic credits, independent of the originating institution. Despite its promise, implementing blockchain in higher education introduces a series of complex technical, organizational, and regulatory challenges. The most immediate barriers are technical and financial — decentralized academic networks require advanced digital infrastructure and skilled IT professionals that many universities lack. High computational power and energy consumption raise significant sustainability concerns. Systemic and data-governance issues present further hurdles, most notably the lack of standardized protocols across diverse educational ecosystems. Privacy regulations such as GDPR conflict directly with blockchain’s immutability principle. Furthermore, the scarcity of qualified blockchain developers and resistance among institutional stakeholders continue to impede adoption. This paper systematically reviews the core features and processes of blockchain technology, its benefits for higher education, and the multifaceted challenges that must be addressed for successful implementation. A synthesis of current blockchain applications in education is presented alongside a discussion of emerging solutions, supported by comparative dataset analysis. The review concludes with actionable recommendations for institutions, policymakers, and researchers to facilitate a responsible and scalable transition toward blockchain-enabled academic ecosystems.
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