International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 12 Issue: 11 | Nov 2025
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
www.irjet.net
A Permissioned Blockchain Architecture for National Athlete Information Management Using Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 and Off-Chain Storage H. Han 1 Independent researcher, 260 Fortfield Rd, Bristol BS14 9QT, UK
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Abstract - National-level athlete management requires
information systems, generating and managing vast amounts of athlete-related data daily for hundreds or even thousands of elite and developmental competitors. The coexistence of these distributed and independently operated systems creates significant challenges for data consistency, interoperability, and governance. The data generated and shared across this ecosystem encompass a wide range of sensitive and confidential information, including athlete identities, biometric profiles, competition performance indicators, injury histories, medical diagnostics, and antidoping laboratory results. Safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity, availability, and transparency of this information is essential—not only to protect athlete privacy but also to ensure accountability, fairness, and public trust in the governance of sport. Transparency, in particular, plays a crucial role by enabling data transactions and updates to remain traceable, verifiable, and auditable across all participating organizations without compromising privacy. This allows authorized stakeholders to determine who accessed or modified records, under what authority, and at what time, thereby discouraging data manipulation, favoritism, and fraudulent alterations.
continuous, secure information exchange among sports governing bodies, sport associations, and sports medicine and anti-doping institutes. Conventional centralized information systems exhibit single points of failure, weak auditability, and inefficient cross-organizational data sharing. This study proposes a permissioned blockchain-based athlete information management system built on Hyperledger Fabric 2.0. The architecture models three key stakeholders as consortium members, employs Raft as a crash-fault-tolerant ordering service, and encodes six core transaction types—personal, training, performance, health, medical, and data-sharing records—through smart contracts (chaincode). To reconcile blockchain immutability with storage efficiency and privacy requirements, the system combines on-chain meta-data with off-chain JSON documents stored in CouchDB, linked via SHA256 hashes and protected by AES-256 encryption. A prototype was implemented using the Fabric First-Network baseline and evaluated with Hyperledger Caliper on mid-range hardware (Intel Core i5 1.6 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD/HDD). Under readonly workloads, the system achieves up to 1,693.02 transactions per second (TPS) for 8 KB payloads and 164.06 TPS for 1 MB payloads, while write-only workloads reach 1,009.55 TPS and 112.87 TPS for the same sizes. These results demonstrate that the proposed architecture can sustain several hundred TPS under realistic data volumes, providing sufficient capacity for national-level athlete information management while delivering strong guarantees of integrity, confidentiality, authentication, and auditability.
Such transparency is especially vital for compliance with international oversight bodies such as the World AntiDoping Agency (WADA), where tamper-proof reporting and audit trails are indispensable for validating test results and enforcing sanctions. In the absence of standardized and transparent data-sharing mechanisms, organizations often face information silos, disputes over record authenticity, and public skepticism regarding the fairness of regulatory processes. Consequently, ensuring both data security and operational transparency is fundamental to establishing a trustworthy digital ecosystem for modern sports governance.
Key Words: Permissioned blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric, Secure data sharing, Off-chain data storage, Athlete information management
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Structural Problems in Current Practice
Elite national sports programs operate within a multiorganizational ecosystem composed of several interdependent institutions. Governmental sports bodies establish national sport policies, oversee athlete selection, and allocate funding; national sport associations and federations manage sport-specific training and competition activities; and sports medicine and anti-doping institutes monitor the medical, physiological, and biochemical wellbeing of athletes. Each of these actors maintains its own
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Three major structural problems characterize the current practice:
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Centralization and single points of failure: Training, performance, and medical management systems are frequently built around centralized servers or institutional databases. Any outage, compromise, or corruption at a single site can cascade to disrupt
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