# Blockchain-Based Applications in Education: A Systematic Review
## 4 Discussion
### What Are the Challenges of Adopting Blockchain Technology in Education? Despite the fact that blockchain has shown its potential in an education context, there are multiple challenges that need to be considered when employing blockchain technology in the education field. In this review article, we have summarized these challenges into some basic categories. While security is the main feature of the blockchain technology, the risk of malicious attacks cannot be removed [40]. It is very difficult to provide security and keep privacy at the same time [10; 11], and this issue becomes more crucial when a person's career is at risk (online authorization of educational credentials and certificates). To ensure privacy, many blockchain frameworks use public and private keys. However, blockchain cannot guarantee transactional privacy because data of each public key are publicly visible [22] and, in this way, user's transactions can be linked to reveal user's information. Adequate storage and protection of private keys of all members is also a security issue that should be amicably handled [35]. Data leakage is a security concern and can occur due to frequent updates of data that should be considered [36]. The slow speed blockchain transactions, known as the blockchain's scalability problem, is one of the issues that can be faced in education systems when using blockchain. This issue has been discussed in most publications. This is about slow transaction speed of big size blocks in blockchain technology as transactions continue and the record grows. The block size increases as a result of a substantial increase in users [10; 12; 14; 24; 41]. Educational systems also have plenty of data to keep track of students who are constantly moving from school to school. This can increase the block size. Every transaction requires peer-to-peer verification that can become time consuming as the number of blocks increase. This is a big challenge of blockchain technology that Bitcoin technology can handle with only three to seven transactions per second [42]. Studies show that this issue can hinder blockchain development in education. Many studies are being held to solve this issue and many researchers proposed some ideas, such as Zilliqa [13], which is a new blockchain platform that is based on sharing technique to breakdown the big blockchain network into multi-shards that validate transactions in parallel. However, scalability concerns must be effectively addressed before the blockchain can be adopted on a wide scale. Blockchain is an emerging technology that needs to integrate with the legacy system. However, the costs of this adoption and implementation can be very high. Besides this implementation cost, transaction or computational cost of many techniques of blockchain is also high [22]. As mentioned above, to manage and store such big student data, as block size increases with the rise of users, the cost will grow as well [10; 23]. Without managing this development and operational cost, it will be difficult to use this technique in traditional education systems [31; 43]. For certificate verifications, there is a need that all institutes should come to agree to share their data. However, the question is how will all institutes become ready to share their data? It is unclear in some cases whether a DLT/Blockchain solution is an improvement over a more traditional, centralized ledger. Moreover, there is insufficient evidence on business gains for educational institutes, which, in turn,makes blockchain adoption more difficult. There can be plenty of risk to change the existing educational practices that affect the existing systems as well as economy. How can authorized organizations be ready to take on the risk to provide their students' credentials? If authorized organizations will not agree to provide such data, then it can create more complications in the authorization process [10; 13; 35]. Higher education policymakers or other policymakers have to consider what the blockchain can be trusted to do, and for how long.