SSSM: A Secure and Scalable Approach for Scholarship Funding Management Based on Blockchain Technology with Zk-Rollups

Scholarship administration plays a critical role within higher educational systems, ensuring deserving students have the financial resources to pursue their education. Nevertheless, conventional scholarship administration methods often encounter fraud, mismanagement, restricted accessibility, and the difficult process of authenticating scholarship applicants. The potential of blockchain technology lies in revolutionizing scholarship administration by providing a decentralized, transparent, and secure structure. Despite its potential, blockchain faces scalability challenges, owing to its lower throughput and latency performance compared to non-blockchain systems. This study introduces a decentralized scholarship management model that leverages blockchain technology and zk-rollups, a layer 2 scaling solution. The implementation is on Polygon zkEVM, using Solidity for smart contracts and other contemporary technologies. The experiment conducted by the researchers revealed that the application utilizing zk-rollup technology necessitates transaction costs that are approximately 25 times lower and operates nearly 53% faster than the system implemented on layer 1.