Academic Payment Tokenization: An Online Payment System for Academia Utilizing Non-Fungible Tokens and Permissionless Blockchain.

Nowadays, traditional payment methods such as cash, cheques, credit/debit cards, and bank transfers are commonly used for financial transactions across a wide range of industries, including healthcare, real estate, supply chain, gaming, music, finance, retail, agriculture, tourism, pharmaceuticals, and the education sector too. However, these methods often involve transaction fees, potential delays, and security concerns. These methods lack transparency and traceability features, making tracking, authenticating, and verifying payments and their associated records difficult. To overcome these issues, we propose a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) based online payment system that leverages blockchain technology (BT) features and security to revolutionize financial expenses in the education sector. We also present wallet generation, fee tokenization and NFT generation processes. These processes utilize Ethereum and an interplanetary file system (IPFS) to store metadata information associated with fee payment details securely. We use Remix IDE, MetaMask wallet, and Sepolia test network to deploy and analyze the proposed system's results. We have also used the JMeter simulation toolkit to conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed system in terms of throughput, latency, and response time. Our assessment identifies the increase in performance parameters with the number of users. This initiative will positively contribute towards addressing the issues of financial transactions in the education sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]