DAVE-CC: A decentralized, access-controlled, verifiable ecosystem for cross-chain academic credential management

Abstract

The verification of academic credentials is facing mounting challenges in an era of global digital transformation. The proliferation of fake degrees, identity fraud, and large-scale data breaches has severely eroded trust in traditional, centralized verification systems. These systems often operate in institutional silos, lack transparency, and are not equipped to function across national or organizational boundaries, making them increasingly inadequate for today’s interconnected, adversarial digital landscape. There is a growing urgency for secure, interoperable, and privacy-preserving mechanisms that can establish decentralized trust at scale. We introduce DAVE-CC, a cross-chain credential verification framework built atop the cross-chain architecture. The primary scientific contribution of DAVE-CC is a novel, holistically decentralized trust architecture for cross-chain credentialing. Unlike prior systems that retain centralized anchors for key management or policy enforcement, our framework synergistically integrates advanced cryptographic primitives to distribute all trust-bearing functions, including credential authorization and attribute-based key generation, across a threshold of independent authorities, thus provably eliminating single points of failure. Our implementation demonstrates low end-to-end latency (2.41 s), compact cryptographic payloads, and resilience under network stress. Scalability tests show throughput improvements from 35 to 140 transactions per second, and latency reduction from 600 ms to 171.4 ms with 30 workers. These results validate the practicality of our trust-distributed architecture for real-world deployment across academic, governmental, and cross-border environments, offering a robust foundation for future-proof credential ecosystems.