Building a credential management system on blockchain with verkle tree

Abstract

Nowadays, along with the continuous development of society, the application of technology in education can be considered a top priority. And one of the important issues in education is certification. Certificates are one of the neccessary documents in job applications and legal documents. Because of the importance of this type of document, the risk of fake degrees and certificates is very high. Therefore, to ensure the integrity and validity of the certificate, a lot of management processes have been applied, but most of them are paper-based works. That costs the owner a lot of time in using and validating the certificate. In order to reduce the time and cost for checking certificates and diplomas, many research groups have proposed a blockchain-based certification model. Blockchain based academic credential systems have showed the potential to transcend the constraints of paper-based certificates. These systems define procedures for issuing and managing credentials using blockchain technology in order to improve security and minimize administrative costs for both universities and companies. Most of the current research is still based on the Merkle tree. Merkle trees, also known as binary hash trees, are a type of data structure that is commonly used in computer science. They are used to encrypt blockchain data more effectively and securely in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It is a data structure made up of hashes of multiple data blocks that summarizes all data (e.g., transactions) stored in a block. It also enables fast, reliable, and secure content verification on large datasets, while verifying the consistency and data integrity. However, Merkle Tree still has certain limits on speed and data processing and retrieval time. Which will be mentioned and emphasized in this article. The main purpose of this report is an introduction to Verkle Tree, a newly published blockchain technology and the advantages it brings compared to the Merkle Tree technology being applied today