NFT-Merit: An NFT-based Module Credit Management System on Ethereum Blockchain

Blockchain is one of the most promising technology trends that has the potential to be extensively adopted in the education sector. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of utilizing an Ethereum blockchain for developing a trusted frame-work using ERC-721 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for a Module credit management system – NFT-Merit. In this framework, the NFTs minted by a university represents the module credits issued by its faculty and owned by its students upon satisfying module requirements in the credit management system. Once a student has collected all the NFTs required for graduating the degree, a smart contract automatically generates a degree certificate which can be integrated with the well-known OpenCert formats. With cases of degree fraud on the rise, the current methods of degree issuance and verification are inadequate in this digital age. This research involves the design and development of a web-based decentralized application (dApp) on the Ethereum blockchain test network. The NFT-merit dApp is hosted on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as a decentralized network of nodes instead of a single centralized node to enable redundancy, improve scalability and minimize network bandwidth usage for data access. We perform an extensive analysis of the costs involved in deploying NFT-merit and the duration of minting NFTs. Our experimental results show that minting NFTs in batches would require almost the same time as minting a single NFT in a transaction, whereas the cost savings in the former scenario is more than 22% as compared to the latter.