ConfMan Web 3.0: Decentralized Academic Conference Management System with Rust and Web 3.0

Academic conferences serve as a useful platform for researchers and educators to share their work and ideas. Upon the paper acceptance, authors need to register their papers, pay registration fees, and present their work at conferences. International conferences often involve multiple parties of users and cross-border payments with multiple channels that incur additional service charges. Conference organisers and reviewers typically contribute voluntarily without any monetary rewards. The emergence of Web 3.0 technology, leveraging the decentralized and secure nature of blockchain, presents an opportunity for this domain. This research creates a decentralized academic conference management system using Web 3.0 (ConfMan Web 3.0) and Rust programming language that simplifies cross-border payments on different channels by using cryptocurrencies instead of fiat currency, thereby reducing service charges. It aims to provide rewards, recognition of contributions, and consolidated historical records to all conference contributors, including authors, reviewers, programme chairs, and organising committees. The Solana blockchain is used to store conference- related data, and a web application is developed for ConfMan Web 3.0. Various testings are conducted to evaluate its performance. The findings highlight the potential of Web 3.0 technology in transforming the academic conference management landscape.