Augmenting Learner Support Services With the Use of Blockchain Technology

Introduction

Blockchain Technology is here to revolutionise all walks of human life. It has already become an important part of financial transactions and digital negotiable instruments replacing the hard currency. The virtual currencies are the most apt example of use of Blockchain Technology (BCT). The recent addition to this continuum is the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) which is another product of the BCT. It would not be out of place to name it as monitoring and tracking technology. It can be used in any area that requires monitoring, tracking, authentication and verification of activities done by the users in a distributed manner. At the core, Blockchain is a system that facilitates recording of important information in a way that makes it almost impossible to change it in any way afterwards. The chain of building blocks keeps it complete and growing further. Each of the new blocks builds upon the earlier block and record information as an add-on to the existing information. The distributed structure of the technology enables appendage of the new information and record of the transaction to the ledger of all the existing partners. This new block will have information about the sender, receiver and other relevant important information (metadata) that needs to be shared over and above the existing information.

As the name suggests Blockchain is a database that stores information in a distributed manner in the form of blocks of information. These blocks of information are linked to each other in a linear way in a specified pattern. Thus, these blocks become a permanent repository of that chunk of information with historical chain log. Whenever a transaction/information is added in the form of a new block, the partners of that chain confirm the validity of the transaction/ addition of the information. On confirmation by all the partners, it becomes a permanent constituent of the cluster and is appended to the existing chain as the last block in that order. Any type of information can be stored in the information blocks. However, since the information stored in the blocks is not editable, the information not requiring any change in its basic structure only is stored in the blocks. Subsequent updates of the information are linearly and chronologically linked to earlier blocks of information so as to put all the information blocks to scrutiny and validation. Each of the blocks in the chain contains important information in the form of a hash of the previous block. “A hash function takes an input of variable length and produces an output of fixed length. This way, hashing within the blockchain (i.e., hash chain) makes it very difficult to change previous blocks, thus ensuring immutability” (Steiu, 2020). The Proof of Work is another important component of the process that provides a testimony for adding a block to the chain. Figure 1 presents the cryptographic linking of blocks in the blockchain.

Figure 1.

Cryptographic linking in blockchain

Source: Thomas (2020)