# Challenges of Using Blockchain in the Education Sector: A Literature Review
## 3 Results
### Challenge 8: Financial Barriers  
The adoption of blockchain technology is an expensive endeavor, and the transaction costs should not be ignored when blockchain technology is used in the education sector. Therefore, this section analyzes the variety of costs considered in the selected articles. Six articles [7, 8, 9, 12, 18, 19] handled this subject from different angles, including infrastructure costs, the costs of handling large amounts of academic data, the time costs due to slow transactions, and the cost of computational energy [71]. In addition, the addition of new features would result in additional costs each time [19]. Consensus protocols consume a burst of energy and resources (i.e., storage, computing, bandwidth, etc. ), especially those used in public blockchains [7]. Moreover, since the entire blockchain must be stored on each node of the network, most blockchains have exceptionally high storage and power consumption costs, due to the computing resources needed to perform cryptography [7]. For example, a terabyte hard disk costs around EUR 60.00, while the same capacity of storage on the Ethereum blockchain costs around EUR 6000.0083 [19]. In terms of energy consumption, a single Bitcoin transaction will consume 160 kWh of electricity, which is sufficient to supply a US family for six days [19]. This would certainly lead to an enormous increase in global electricity consumption if it were continuously scaled up to a large number of transactions per second [19]. To save storage, as an alternative to explicitly storing records on a blockchain, only the ciphertext of those records is saved [9]. However, even this is not sufficient to meet the energy and storage requirements of blockchain technology [9]. Therefore, some blockchain systems now merely save the hash of their transaction content in the ledger [9]. A cryptographic approach, known as a Merkle tree, which is a hash of other hashes, is a typical way to achieve this type of storage [8], where the real data encoded by the hashes, including certifications, identities, personal information, contracts, etc., must still be saved off-chain in such systems [8]. In the education sector, the use of the blockchain can lead to significant costs. This is dependent on the characteristics of the intended application, complexity, the type of blockchain used, the blockchain platform, how its features are valued (e.g., immutability, availability, etc. ), and other technology stacks [19]. For example, the Ethereum transaction pricing market is volatile, resulting in unexpected transaction-fee increases. The underlying asset used to power these transactions, \"gas,\" has a block-level restriction, and any transaction that fails to pay the needed amount of \"gas\" will be discarded by the other peers. In addition, Ethereum itself is costly, which raises the entire cost of transacting on the Ethereum blockchain [57]. On the other hand, Stellar is a blockchain designed to keep transaction costs low [57]. Furthermore, building a decentralized application on a public blockchain, such as Ethereum, will be much less expensive than creating an enterprise blockchain on a private platform [9]. In addition, when creating a blockchain application from scratch, the cost will be increased by adding the costs for infrastructure improvement, smart contracts, transaction fees, cryptography, consensus algorithms, and more expenses [9]. Based on the consensus algorithm used, the acquisition of blockchain is accompanied by a high demand for electricity [18]. This is due to the fact that the consensus algorithms, such as proof-of-work (PoW), include the use of computing power to verify the reliability of the data being entered into the blockchain. To mitigate this situation, solutions such as the use of advanced mining equipment and the adoption of alternative consensus algorithms, such as proof-of-stake, are used [18]. In addition, the costs of data space, due to data redundancy and scalability, are closely linked to this aspect.