Abstract
The rapid globalization of higher education and expanding student mobility have intensified the demand for tamper-proof, interoperable, and universally verifiable academic credentials. Traditional centralized credentialing systems face substantial challenges, including vulnerability to diploma fraud, burdensome bureaucratic verification delays, and cross-border validation friction. This research investigates the effectiveness of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in addressing these systemic bottlenecks by designing, implementing, and evaluating a cross-border, permissioned DLT framework for digital academic records. Deployed across a consortium pilot involving six higher education institutions in Europe, Asia, and North America, the framework integrates W3C Verifiable Credentials with smart contract-governed decentralized public key infrastructure. Quantitative performance metrics revealed that the DLT-based architecture reduced median cross-border verification latency from 14.2 business days to 1.84 seconds while eliminating fraudulent payload injection attempts during adversarial testing. Furthermore, a mixed-methods evaluation combining the System Usability Scale (SUS = 82.4) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) demonstrated high institutional trust and perceived usefulness among university registrars and admissions officers. The findings establish that decentralized architectures can effectively reconcile document immutability with international data privacy mandates, providing a scalable paradigm for lifelong learning credentialing and transnational academic mobility.
