A Cloud-Native Blockchain-Integrated Architecture for Digital Credential Management in Learning Management Systems: Empirical Performance Evaluation and Deployment Trade-Offs

Trustworthy digital credential management is increasingly important in LMS-connected higher-education information systems, yet institutions still lack controlled implementation-oriented evidence on how cloud-native service decomposition and blockchain-backed trust services influence deployment performance. This study develops and evaluates a cloud-native architecture that combines containerized microservices with Hyperledger Fabric-based permissioned ledger services and a Polygon-linked public-chain anchoring path for credential issuance, learning-record verification, and record validation. Unlike largely conceptual prior work, it benchmarks four functionally aligned deployment paths in a unified Kubernetes-managed testbed: a monolithic baseline, a microservices-only baseline, a Hyperledger Fabric-integrated variant, and a Polygon-linked anchoring path. The credential-service paths were evaluated under stepped workloads from 1000 to 20,000 scheduled virtual users. Evaluation focused on service-path latency, throughput, tamper-detection accuracy, and resource utilization. The microservices-only architecture achieved the lowest baseline latency (182 ms), Hyperledger Fabric maintained stable response times for trusted institutional workflows (352 ms at baseline and 485 ms at 20,000 virtual users), and the Polygon-linked anchoring path reached the highest observed service-path throughput (228 TPS) in the tested prototype. Both blockchain-integrated variants detected tampered credentials in all successfully processed tamper cases. Overall, the results show that cloud-native decomposition and ledger-backed trust and anchoring can support scalable and trustworthy credential services when platform choice aligns with institutional governance scope, verification audience, and deployment constraints.