Blockchain na gestão do acervo acadêmico de instituições federais de ensino superior: uma proposta de implementação

Abstract

The Ministry of Education (MEC) has made efforts to improve efficiency and security in the process of issuing diplomas, certificates and official documents, encouraging research and development of solutions in this context. Blockchain technology has been increasingly mentioned by the Federal Government as a possible tool to modernize and improve processes in the public sphere. This technology can be understood as a distributed registry capable of guaranteeing the immutability and authenticity of data, without depending on a central authority, and is considered by many authors as a disruptive technology, capable of generating innovation by breaking with old models and introducing new standards. . Driven by these assumptions, this work developed and implemented an application that uses the Ethereum blockchain to ensure the immutability, integrity and availability of an academic collection item originating from a Federal Institution of Higher Education (IFES). The programming languages PHP and Javascript were used, with the help of libraries and specific tools for programming Smart Contracts (smart contracts) and connection with the Ethereum blockchain. The effectiveness of the application was confirmed by evaluating the results using tools such as Node Explorers. However, the results also revealed that the costs associated with the operation can pose a challenge to the project's scalability, which makes the development of private blockchain networks (permissioned blockchains) by public organizations a potentially more viable solution.