European Journal of Business Science and Technology 2026, 12(1):47-61
Microcertificates Smart Contract Performance on Proof-of-Authority Blockchain
- 1 Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic
Permissioned blockchains that use proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus mechanisms are becoming more popular for business and institutional applications. However, there is a big gap in the aca- demic literature about how well these systems work in real situations, like when they’re used with smart contracts on live production networks. Existing blockchain credential platforms, including Blockcerts and the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), have shown that these platforms can work. However, there aren’t many published examples. It’s important to remember that these examples are often based on test environments, not real-world operations. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting a comprehensive, statistically based performance analysis of a smart contract-based micro-credentialing system utilized on the Bloxberg PoA blockchain. The entire certificate lifecycle, including issuance, revocation, and verification, is tested with controlled stress tests that are repeated many times at each load level. The process involves assigning workloads to the live network and then collecting key performance indicators (KPIs). The key performance indicators (KPIs) mentioned earlier include things like gas consumption with opcode-level breakdown, how long transactions take with standard deviations and 95% confidence intervals, and logical throughput. The findings show a clear trade-off in performance metrics. The application can verify things quickly (118 milliseconds on average), which makes it suitable for real-time use. However, the atomic issuance model has throughput bottlenecks, reaching a saturation point of about 4.2 transactions per second. It also demonstrates cost inefficiencies due to the repetition of base-fee overhead. A thorough review of how gas is used is also provided.
Keywords: blockchain, proof-of-authority, smart contracts, bloxberg, ethereum virtual machine, micro-credentials, digital certificates, performance benchmarking, verifiable credentials
JEL classification: L86
Received: January 19, 2026; Revised: May 4, 2026; Accepted: May 13, 2026; Published: September 15, 2026 Show citation
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