# Trusted Academic Transcripts on the Blockchain: A Systematic Literature Review
## 1 Introduction  
In the last ten to fifteen years, the production of forged academic certificates' has become a global problem as educational qualifications have gained increasing commercial value [1]. The rising number of fake diplomas is often seen as a consequence of the crisis, where desperate people forge certificates in order to obtain job qualifications [2]. However, recent research shows that the counterfeiting of diplomas involves not only lower-tier staff but also activists, members of the Government, officials, and university candidates [3]. As a recent review has shown, transcript issuance administration and management face many adversities [4]. In its physical form, a transcript is easily to manipulate and hardly verifiable [5, 6]. When digitized, transcripts are still shared with difficulty between institution's or employer platforms [7, 8] while being highly exposed to security vulnerabilities. From a financial aspect, these issues can result in high costs and offer minimal rewards for those attempting to address them [9, 10]. To solve this problem and to improve the burdensome and time-consuming administrative work surrounding certificates, many researchers have proposed blockchain technology to speed-up academic diploma issuance and verification [11, 12, 13]. The interest stems from the fact that, being decentralized, blockchain could quickly solve the manipulation problem and reduce resources required to store the records [14]. Its ability to improve traceability can enable fake diplomas to be spotted with ease. Thus, the use of smart contracts and automated processes could reduce the need for intermediaries. Finally, the consensusmechanism and the presence of a cryptocurrency could ensure a broad recognition of records as well as an incentive for contributions to the verification processes [15; 16]. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Nicosia were the first Universities to issue academic certificates on the Bitcoin blockchain [17; 18]. Later, with the emergence of the Ethereum blockchain, other institutes such as the University of Singapore deployed their application and certificates [19; 20]. As privacy and scalability limitations of public blockchains are notoriously hard to overcome, later prototypes were also developed on IBM Hyperledger, providing a permissioned chain [21; 22]. Finally, institutions in China and Vietnam also proposed an ad hoc blockchain specifically deployed for academic applications [14; 23]. Although all these projects are blockchain-based, their heterogeneity may prevent a common standard for academic applications from emerging. Without a standard or a homogeneous model, widespread adoption could be unlikely to happen soon [24]. On the other hand, the motivation behind the technology choice for preventing forgery of academic certificate lies in that, on the blockchain, it is possible to trace in a fast, secure, and trustless manner the origin of crypto assets and then to quickly spot fake, fraudulent, or unwanted transactions [25]. This traceability feature fueled the hypothesis that blockchain is also capable of tracing real-world assets (such as academic records) with the same degree of security, speed, and trustworthiness [26]. However, real-world assets constitute an externality to the blockchain and need to be attached by external third parties referred to as oracles [27]. Since oracles are centralized and trusted entities (e.g., universities), their roles and implications needs to be considered when developing and evaluating real-world decentralized applications. Known as \"the oracle problem\", the ability for oracles to upload unverified or false data to the blockchain could easily undermine the potential for blockchain's application to academic transcripts [18]. If oracles are not trusted, then the blockchain transcript will not be trusted too.